Reply to post: Re: x86?

Intel drags Xeon Phi Knights Hill chips out back... two shots heard

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: x86?

The x200 (Knights Landing) Xeon Phis are full x86_64 CPUs, with all the usual gubbins (but sans virtualization and enterprise-related bits). They can boot unmodified x86_64 Linux kernels, and will run most binaries compiled for modern Xeons (up to and including avx2). It might also boot Windows (never tried, and don't care) - but the licensing cost may be seriously interesting.

Each core is slower than a modern Xeon core (by a 2x-3x factor running unmodified Xeon binaries), but there are a lot of them (64 to 72, depending on the SKU). In real-life usage, you will probably want to recompile to use the AVX512 vector units; in favorable cases this could improve the FLOPS rate by 4x factor.

The package also comes with 16GB on-package L3 cache, which is quite fast (400+GB/s of application-visible bandwith) and six DDR4 memory channels, so you can go up to 384GBytes. It will take standard PCIe peripherals, and the standard Linux drivers work just fine.

So it is a quite serious x86_64 CPU. Unfortunately, the prices are also rather non-funny (See https://ark.intel.com/products/series/92650/Intel-Xeon-Phi-x200-Product-Family), and given the low volume you are unlikely to do much better than the RCP. If you can't buy in the US, the usual 1:1 USD to EUR/GBP conversion rates make it worse.

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