60 core Xeon Phi Host Processor for 300 dollars?

[honna1612]

Hello I wanted to ask if someone in this forum has any experience with XEON PHI.

I can see that you can get a XEON PHI processor for just 350 dollars:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-Phi-Coprocessor-3120P-Processor-Board-SC3120P-/142226338896?hash=item211d59b450:g:De8AAOSwEzxYY34W

 

I can see in the documentation that you can set them to native mode.

But it is uncertain wheter you still need to compile especially for the PHI or if all cores are shown in the taskmanager. Has anyone tried this?

 

Another similar topic: no youtuber so far seems to have shown or reviewed that the newest XEON PHI actually is literally like any other CPU.

It needs a LGA 3647 motherboard and Knights landing has up to 70 Cores with 1.5Ghz. I would love to see how it performs in gaming or even cinebench!

This thing is an ATX board btw:

 

So does anyone here have any experience with the XEON phi or the newer Xeon Phi Host CPUs?

[The Sloth]

6 minutes ago, honna1612 said:

how it performs in gaming or even cinebench!

those  CPUs are vary low powered, low IPC made for cluster environments.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

1 minute ago, nerdslayer1 said:

those CPUs are vary low powered, low IPC CPU made for cluster environments.

Lol, i think this isn't for threadripper

[NicholasNicholasNicholas]

it would be useless. those cores are slow as fuck due to the low clock speed

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, nerdslayer1 said:

those  CPUs are vary low powered, low IPC made for cluster environments.

But anything blue will boost gaming performance blue-fold and that's what matters, plus is a 60 core CPU so that's 15 times more than your regular quad core which means 15 times more FPS in CPU bound game. Well sorry./s

[Nicnac]

I saw an article on how they can be used for boinc projects I believe but it looked like quite a hassle and not really worth it in the end. Although I love this kind of server compute hardware, this one seems to work only for highly specific workloads which none of us "normies" understand  

[Coaxialgamer]

That specific xeon phi is part of the knights corner family .

They can only be used a co-processors for running custom code ( on linux ) . they can't function as the main cpu and require a  host cpu to function.

 

Knights landing , which released not so long ago , is able to function as a host cpu , but is composed of glorified atom cores.

[UglyDuckiling]

Toasters these days are better for gaming than that.

[honna1612]

1 hour ago, Nickathom said:

 

it would be useless. those cores are slow as fuck due to the low clock speed

 

I dont think you understand. Its VALUE FOR PRICE. If you buy a 22 Xeon E7 for 4000 Dollars you also get low powered cores with 2.2 Ghz. With this you get 60 for 350. Also some people said it only runs On linux which is false.

For Handbrake encoding this would be fun to use. Also you can just put it into a PCIe slow without buying a new motherboard!

 

Of course you dont get more fps. I didnt state that. I was wondering how it would perform in games. Literally unplayable or mediocre.

The question I had was: If you put that coprocessor into NATIVE mode, will it be shown in Taskmanager or do you still need to compile for it?

[UglyDuckiling]

25 minutes ago, honna1612 said:

I dont think you understand. Its VALUE FOR PRICE. If you buy a 22 Xeon E7 for 4000 Dollars you also get low powered cores with 2.2 Ghz. With this you get 60 for 350. Also some people said it only runs On linux which is false.

For Handbrake encoding this would be fun to use. Also you can just put it into a PCIe slow without buying a new motherboard!

 

Of course you dont get more fps. I didnt state that. I was wondering how it would perform in games. Literally unplayable or mediocre.

The question I had was: If you put that coprocessor into NATIVE mode, will it be shown in Taskmanager or do you still need to compile for it?

TOASTERS, yes toasters have better gaming hardware than what this could possibly pump out, unless you think 1.10ghz intel Shitom cores can do anything?

 

LOL.

 

 

[dalekphalm]

43 minutes ago, honna1612 said:

I dont think you understand. Its VALUE FOR PRICE. If you buy a 22 Xeon E7 for 4000 Dollars you also get low powered cores with 2.2 Ghz. With this you get 60 for 350. Also some people said it only runs On linux which is false.

For Handbrake encoding this would be fun to use. Also you can just put it into a PCIe slow without buying a new motherboard!

 

Of course you dont get more fps. I didnt state that. I was wondering how it would perform in games. Literally unplayable or mediocre.

The question I had was: If you put that coprocessor into NATIVE mode, will it be shown in Taskmanager or do you still need to compile for it?

There's a problem here in your comparison.

 

A single core from an E7-series Xeon will smoke a single core from a Phi coprocessor (or any single Atom core) - that's pretty much regardless of what frequency is set.

 

If you downclocked an E7 Xeon to match a current gen Atom CPU, and performed a single threaded test, the Xeon should come out quite a bit ahead.

 

So yeah, 60 "atom" cores sounds awesome, but it's still pretty low power individually. Great for compute workloads. Something like Handbrake is a good example of a program that could "in theory" utilize the extra coprocessor cores.

 

Whoever said it only runs on Linux? In practice, that might be true, but of course, it will run on any OS that Intel develops drivers/software/API/interface for, really. I do not know if there is current Windows compatibility or not - there very well could be.

 

The Phi card itself hosts a micro distro of Linux. When in Native Mode, the Phi "appears" as a separate computer/machine that is accessible by the Host computer via clustered computing.

 

I do not think this particular Phi that you linked can run without a CPU.

 

I also do not think that the Phi's "resources" will show up in Task Manager - as the documentation says, it shows up as a separate machine, not just more CPU cores.

Knights Landing was supposed to allow Phi's to operate as a Host Processor, but I have seen no info to confirm that.

[honna1612]

The Phi card itself hosts a micro distro of Linux. When in Native Mode, the Phi "appears" as a separate computer/machine that is accessible by the Host computer via clustered computing.

You speak of default mode. In the default mode the Xeon Phi Coprocessor is like a linux connected via a 10GBe NIC.

I found no documentation what native mode does.

 

The other thing is the knights landing which already is realeased and is its on 60-70 core processor with 256 Threads. You cannot order them directly, you need a supermicro motherboard with it. https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon_Phi/

 

The first thing for 350 dollar is only a good buy if you can execute windows software without recompiling (in my opinion)

The Xeon Knights Landing is definitely faster and easier to use but costs 5k dollars with a workstation and I wonder if it even performs better that the 22 Core Xeon with 2.2Ghz. Oh and it is definitely released AND usable like that:

 

I just saw the coprocessor on ebay for 300 bucks and didnt know why no youtuber has tested this thing yet!

 

 

[Hunter259]

Except for it to be anywhere near usable it would have to be massively parallel which most things are not. That 256 core chip only gets about 7 single core points. A Pentium 4 would kick its ass.

[honna1612]

But then Linus can release a video titled: 1 Gamer, 256 Cores

Where he shows off how most games wont even run properly and this thing struggles to get 5fps, but then continues to show how it destroys in cinebench!

[SpaceGhostC2C]

7 hours ago, honna1612 said:

 Also you can just put it into a PCIe slow without buying a new motherboard!

Be very careful with compatibility before buying anything: the PHI will not be properly recognized by any motherboard with the appropriate PCIe slot. You may need to have very specific (non-consumer) chipsets to be able to use it.

1 hour ago, honna1612 said:

The first thing for 350 dollar is only a good buy if you can execute windows software without recompiling (in my opinion)

I don't know if they achieved that at the particular generation you are linking, but the idea behind PHI is to supersede GPGPU by using x86 cores that will take the same instructions as a normal CPU, eliminating the need to code in CUDA/OpenCL. Basically you compile the code the way you would for a CPU with N cores, and then N happens to be the number of cores in the PHI (or the host+the PHI, but you would somehow tackle the difference in performance). The fact that it's seen as a different node in a cluster doesn't matter, since you are already coding for parallel computing anyway (it could be an issue for OpenMP, but for MPI you don't really care whether the cores are inside the same CPU or in two different continents). With GPGPU, you would need to code the relevant CUDA or OpenCL (or any alternative) parts, and then hook them up your code through specific libraries, etc.

 

So, the bottom line is: you wouldn't need to recompile if your code is already written to run in N cores, for arbitrary N. The rest is up to how the PHI is seen by the OS, and therefore how it can be addressed to run things.

[antoipod]

On 5/20/2017 at 0:51 PM, honna1612 said:

I dont think you understand. Its VALUE FOR PRICE. If you buy a 22 Xeon E7 for 4000 Dollars you also get low powered cores with 2.2 Ghz. With this you get 60 for 350. Also some people said it only runs On linux which is false.

For Handbrake encoding this would be fun to use. Also you can just put it into a PCIe slow without buying a new motherboard!

 

Of course you dont get more fps. I didnt state that. I was wondering how it would perform in games. Literally unplayable or mediocre.

The question I had was: If you put that coprocessor into NATIVE mode, will it be shown in Taskmanager or do you still need to compile for it?

 Would it even be possible to run it in windows? I recently got an Intel Xeon Phi 7120A coprocessor with 61 cores and it seems it can only be used in specific applications using Linux.

[honna1612]

Of course the Coprocessor cards are running a small linux system and the cards looks to the host like a linux pc connected via ethernet.

So you can run them On windows but only with software that also works on Linux oO

To run software on this you have to compile it with a special flag on the intel compiler. (It can run any x86 compiled code but not as fast)

 

The newer Host CPUs with 70 cores are like any other CPU with, so you can install windows server or anything similar on it.

Looking at many benchmarks it is really not a good buy. Even with AES 256 a single XEON with 22 cores seems to be a little bit faster than this.

 

But the 350 dollar card mentioned in my first post seems to be a good buy. (If you have software that can run on linux and can utilize 60+ cores)