[World Wide] Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P < $200

[Guest MrE]

Intel® Xeon Phi™ Coprocessor 31S1P special promotion price of $195

 

 

Source/Shops: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/special-promotion-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-31s1p

 

Conditions:

• Effective October 06 2014, expiring December 31 2014
• Volume limitations may apply
• Program volume limited to Intel’s supply of 31S1P

[ManWithBeard1990]

What would one use it for though?

[spwath]

What to use it for?

[Briggsy]

@ManWithBeard1990 wrote:

What would one use it for though?

Probably one of those "If you have to ask, you probably don't need it" kind of things.

parallel compute basically. Autocad etc..

http://www.deskeng.com/de/faster-rendering-and-visualization/

[ManWithBeard1990]

@Briggsby

 

That's true. But I still don't quite understand how you'd use it. Is it like an OpenCL thing or is it literally like adding a second CPU to the system? If it's the latter I'd seriously consider one, but I doubt it's plug and play like that.

[LukaP]

Can anyone lend me some money? I know exactly how to use this

[DigitalHermit]

Can it be used for gaming?

[LukaP]

@DigitalHermit if you find a really heavily multithreaded game, yes. 

 

as a graphics processor, no

[spwath]

@LukaP whats the really good usE?

[.spider.]

Its passivily cooled so it will burn up in a regular PC in seconds?

[LukaP]

@spwath, it would be rendering (there are renderers that can offload to a Phi) and also getting familiar with highly parallel processing, since that genuinly is the future

[qwertywarrior]

ok i might actually buy one just for the hell of it

this looks soo cool

[Pelop17]

This can be helpful

 

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/is-the-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-right-for-me

 

I might also buy one

[LukaP]

@qwertywarrior can i has too?

[harrynowl]

If integrated graphics become enough for me (looking at you iris pro 6200) I might buy because I can

[kennethnakasone]

@LukaP

 

How does offloading to the Phi work exactly? 

[LukaP]

@LukaP

 

How does offloading to the Phi work exactly? 

well, you have a renderer compiled to use the 512b SIMD, and then you render through a command line interface. basically you give it the parameters and the scene, input it in the command line, wait some time, when it says its done, there will be an image/animation saved where you told it to. you can also have the host cpu helping the render process as well. did this answer your question?

[kennethnakasone]

well, you have a renderer compiled to use the 512b SIMD, and then you render through a command line interface. basically you give it the parameters and the scene, input it in the command line, wait some time, when it says its done, there will be an image/animation saved where you told it to. you can also have the host cpu helping the render process as well. did this answer your question?

 

I didn't understand half of it, but yeah it did (I'll google the little details). Thanks.

[LukaP]

I didn't understand half of it, but yeah it did (I'll google the little details). Thanks.

good. i wasnt completly sure what the question was, so my answer was to what i assumed it to be

[ionbasa]

And why would I want 50 something pentium 4 equivalents? Not to forget its missing most x86 functionality.

I guess I could always use it Linux KVM and some virtual machines. Might be interesting toy to play with for under $200. 

As far as I understand, it runs its own onboard linux distro, and you connect to it via ssh.

 

Hmmm.

[LukaP]

And why would I want 50 something pentium 4 equivalents? Not to forget its missing most x86 functionality.

I guess I could always use it Linux KVM and some virtual machines. Might be interesting toy to play with for under $200. 

As far as I understand, it runs its own onboard linux distro, and you connect to it via ssh.

 

Hmmm.

for highly parallel (over 100 threads) memory bandwith dependent tasks. basically if you dont know you need it/can use it, you dont need to buy it

[ionbasa]

for highly parallel (over 100 threads) memory bandwith dependent tasks. basically if you dont know you need it/can use it, you dont need to buy it

True. Intel actually published a guide on how to patch the LInux KVM to get the card to act as a host CPU and get passed on to guests with translation: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/getting-kernel-based-virtual-machine-kvm-to-work-with-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors

Also, I believe Zen supports the Phi also with a patch.

Might be interesting to play around with for someone who tends to run many VMs...

[LukaP]

True. Intel actually published a guide on how to patch the LInux KVM to get the card to act as a host CPU and get passed on to guests with translation: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/getting-kernel-based-virtual-machine-kvm-to-work-with-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessors

Also, I believe Zen supports the Phi also with a patch.

Might be interesting to play around with for someone who tends to run many VMs...

im not sure how well VMs would run on it, since its not your conventional x86 core. 

[ionbasa]

im not sure how well VMs would run on it, since its not your conventional x86 core. 

Thats why I'm a bit hesitant. There is also another company that does virtualization which supports the Phi out of the box: http://www.scalemp.com/media-hub-item/scalemp-vsmp-foundation-to-support-intel-xeon-phi/

They claim:

“vSMP Foundation for the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor based platform will virtualize both the Intel Xeon processor and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor based platform cores as well as host and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor memory to act like a single Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) system. Users will have easy access to all of the computing and memory resources, greatly simplifying their development and production environments,” stated Shai Fultheim, founder and CEO of ScaleMP.

vSMP Foundation for the Intel Xeon Phi product family will support a single VM across both Intel Xeon cores and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor cores – providing unified execution environment for shared memory codes. The VM will allow all cores to access a unified memory pool, comprised from the host memory and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor memory – dismissing the need for programmatically buffer transfer between host and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor memory, thus greatly simplifying the development of applications that can make use of Intel’s Xeon Phi product family based platform.

There aren't any 'benchmarks' that I'm aware of at the moment. But, using Phi cores in translation as SMPs is a novel way to use the actual coprocessor in my opinion. Might help those VMs that do need lots of CPU threads...

[LukaP]

Thats why I'm a bit hesitant. There is also another company that does virtualization which supports the Phi out of the box: http://www.scalemp.com/media-hub-item/scalemp-vsmp-foundation-to-support-intel-xeon-phi/

They claim:

There aren't any 'benchmarks' that I'm aware of at the moment. But, using Phi cores in translation as SMPs is a novel way to use the actual coprocessor in my opinion. Might help those VMs that do need lots of CPU threads...

the problem is, Phis dont use AVX and SSE (the backbone of most current programs). they use a custom 512b vector SIMD... so it would need some recoding