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News Intel unveils 50-core maths co-processor card

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by arcticstoat, 21 Jun 2011.

  1. arcticstoat

    arcticstoat Minimodder

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  2. Burhoom

    Burhoom What's a Dremel?

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    But can it run Crysis?

    ...sorry couldn't resists :p
     
  3. Paradigm Shifter

    Paradigm Shifter de nihilo nihil fit

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    Whether it becomes a threat to GPGPU depends solely on its performance in equivalent applications.

    Also, different architectures will always perform differently at different tasks. It might be amazing at one thing (handily beating GPGPU) and be terrible at another.

    Time will tell.
     
  4. Evildead666

    Evildead666 What's a Dremel?

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    Thats quite an exhaust vent on that card. Must need some serious cooling.
    Even though that looks like the same pic we've been shown for ages, I wonder if the latest version will be a dual 8-pin affair, with some pretty high thermals.
     
  5. kenco_uk

    kenco_uk I unsuccessfully then tried again

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  6. Tattysnuc

    Tattysnuc Thinking about which mod to do 1st.

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    How does this affect existing software? Will software have to be written specifically to run on this, or will it just accelerate the maths calculations that can be parallelised? Folding....?
     
  7. GuilleAcoustic

    GuilleAcoustic Ook ? Ook !

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    I'm looking forward to it. I'm planing to develop a physic engine and that would be lovely in pair with a nice GPU for the display.
     
  8. Taffy

    Taffy Folding for Margaret 17/3/2011 RIP

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    History repeating itself, first just CPU's, then CPU's with a separate maths co-processor, then CPU and integrated maths co-processor. Now an additional separate maths co processor, What Next ?
     
  9. StoneyMahoney

    StoneyMahoney What's a Dremel?

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    I can see research lab administrators being quite happy to buy a dedicated maths accelerator card for staff workstations where they would normally baulk at requests for gaming graphics cards. How well will it perform and how easy is it to offload work to it? Being x86 based, I imagine it'll be more flexible than GPGPUs just not quite as fast as the things GPGPUs can do.
     
  10. John_T

    John_T Minimodder

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    Maybe, but not necessarily. Without the need for Video Outputs like on GPU's they may just as well open up the back as not - it'd be a bit silly not to really...
     
  11. GuilleAcoustic

    GuilleAcoustic Ook ? Ook !

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    I'm wondering how it will perform on the price / perf / power draw compared to GPU and CUDA / openCL.
     
  12. Phalanx

    Phalanx Needs more dragons and stuff.

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    They'll attach a CPU to it soon, just watch. Dual CPU PCs using one on a PCI-E port ;)
     
  13. Baekkel

    Baekkel Picky Picture Villian

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    I can see the scenario... SR-2 with Xeon add-ins
    ..?60Core madness?
     
  14. NiHiLiST

    NiHiLiST New-born car whore

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    Is there any word on whether this will support OpenCL? I believe that's the way we should go going, so computers can just have a pool of processing resources, be it CPUs, graphics cards or co-processors, which work together seamlessly. I understand it's much more complex than this from a programming and performance point of view, but it's a nice idea.
     
  15. Autti

    Autti What's a Dremel?

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    being x86 based doesn't net any benefits, in fact a lot of downfalls. x86 isn't designed to work specifically with high bandwidth processors like this, and his comments referring to programming a xeon is simply unfounded. You will have to completely re-write the program if you wan't it performed efficiently on this. Sure it's x86 coding, but if you have to write a program what does it matter what code, specifically when CUDA offers such unparalleled support.

    I will reserve comments on the performance until there is more detail of what they have taken from the Larrabee core, but one thing should be pointed out. It's not just competing against Tesla, it has to compete with a few other processors as well such as Niagra which is a 128thread best of parallel processing.
     
  16. Autti

    Autti What's a Dremel?

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    found Intel's paper stating they achieved 950Gflops, with 1200Gflops the theoretical maximum, which means Tesla comfortably beats it.
     
  17. azazel1024

    azazel1024 What's a Dremel?

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    I don't know exactly the core design of the processor, so its hard to know just how fast the thing is going to be in different application (always the impirical method). However, my guess is, if it is using out of order instruction sets and most of the other goodies you see in current SB or even core x86 processors then my guess is that it is going to be a lot faster than GPU computing for a number of tasks, but still slower at some of the basic math highly parrallel stuff, like breaking hashes, etc take relatively little math, is completely inorder processesing and benifits from hugely parrallel processing, which 50 cores can't out compete 400+.

    However, stuff that requires a couple of floating point precisions is probably going to run faster on this thing with its 50, assumedly faster and greater instruction flexibility, cores than on a GPU with more, but less capable cores.

    My other guess, this is going to be a lot like CPU vs GPU computing. Somethings work better on full fledged CPUs and somethings work better on full fledged GPUs. This I think is going to be one of those grey areas inbetween where it is better than both at some things, and not as good at others. You need a steak knife for steak, a scaling knife for scaling and a paring knife for fruit. You can use each for the other's tasks, but they just aren't as good.
     
  18. GuilleAcoustic

    GuilleAcoustic Ook ? Ook !

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    Tyan Thunder n4250QE + Tyan Thunder M4985-SI Expansion Board + 8x 12-cores opteron = 96 cores ... and you still have 4x PCI-e16x free to be used .... nom nom nom
     
  19. Sensei

    Sensei What's a Dremel?

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    Can none of you see whats happening? This is Skynet all over again. Well Im not hanging around for some T800 to ruin my day.

    JC
     
  20. moreard

    moreard What's a Dremel?

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    This reminded me of my first choice in computing - 486SX or 486DX
     
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