64 Cores - Why Would We DO This??

[Emily Young]

We reviewed the Xeon Phi a while back, but neglected to answer one important question: Can it run Fortnite?

 

 

Buy a GTX 1060 6GB:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/XxmBoe
On Newegg: http://geni.us/hxADM3

 

Buy a Core i7 8700K instead of a Xeon Phi:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/YDdmP9k
On Newegg: http://geni.us/2RErFG

 

Or go Team Red and buy a Ryzen 7 2700X:
On Amazon: http://geni.us/rwmHAm9
On Newegg: http://geni.us/zXGv

[MrShinny]

Good job Linus, I am proud of you.

[ZcanKal]

Try Minecraft with Optifine, with multi-core rendering on.

[Hunter259]

Xeon Phi doesn't really exist as a coprocessor anymore. Knights landing and after were never released to the general market as PCIE cards. Maybe some very special customers were able to get some but that is a big unknown.

[MrShinny]

4 minutes ago, Hunter259 said:

Xeon Phi doesn't really exist as a coprocessor anymore. Knights landing and after were never released to the general market as PCIE cards. Maybe some very special customers were able to get some but that is a big unknown.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-X-Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7210-1-30GHz-64-core-16GB-SR2X4-/292370183021

https://www.ebay.com/p/Intel-Xeon-Phi-5110P-60-Core-Coprocessor/1323008135

https://www.ebay.com/p/Intel-Xeon-Phi-7250-68-Core-Server-Processor-CPU-1-40ghz-16gb-Lga-3647-X200-QS/1295268535

 

I guess you can buy them, but not really officially.

[Hunter259]

10 minutes ago, MrShinny said:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/2-X-Intel-Xeon-Phi-Processor-7210-1-30GHz-64-core-16GB-SR2X4-/292370183021

https://www.ebay.com/p/Intel-Xeon-Phi-5110P-60-Core-Coprocessor/1323008135

https://www.ebay.com/p/Intel-Xeon-Phi-7250-68-Core-Server-Processor-CPU-1-40ghz-16gb-Lga-3647-X200-QS/1295268535

 

I guess you can buy them, but not really officially.

Two of those are LGA chips to be used as main processors and the 5110P is a Knights Corner PCIE card.

[Ezzy-525]

That was even worse than I imagined.

[Egg-Roll]

Never knew the 1060 (low end till 1050 Ti) was midrange... I thought my 1070 was "midrange"... So does this mean I now have a high end GPU?

 

Also, fart jokes? Common... We're better than that...

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

But can it run Minecraft

[Mira Yurizaki]

The explanation given at 2:34 made me cringe. It made me really cringe.

 

But eh, it's a media company that just happens to do tech shows.

 

EDIT: And the bit around 4:45

[Paddi01]

16 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The explanation given at 2:34 made me cringe. It made me really cringe.

What's wrong about it?

[MrShinny]

56 minutes ago, Hunter259 said:

Two of those are LGA chips to be used as main processors and the 5110P is a Knights Corner PCIE card.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Intel-Xeon-Phi-5110P-1-053GHZ-225W-PCI-Express-60-CORE-Coprocessor-708360-001/382481766724?epid=27015261092&hash=item590db09944:g:CZAAAOSwxLVbFcUJ:sc:USPSFirstClass!28207!US!-1

 

Would that be one?

[Tomatodude95]

Why no cinebench run linus?

[Tomatodude95]

15 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Disabling hyper-threading would probably mitigate the problem, but the clock speeds are terrible. =/

AFAIK probably not, windows is (normally) smart enough to put threads onto different physical processors. given that there are still one with less load available, of which there are plenty in this case.

[Tomatodude95]

2 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

If the OS got optimized for that architecture, but it may not be the case, as people usually run Linux on this kind of processors. Also, I don't know what would be the behaviour if you, for example, used processor affinity for 4 threads, that could be mapped to either the first thread of the first 4 cores or all the threads in a single core.

First of all yes, these are normally run on linux systems. But anyhow (again) AFAIK the system can differenciate between physical and logical cores and can therefore assign each of the 4 threads to a (cpu-)thread on a different physical core. I think the OS can get or request some kind of map from the cpu for the logical to physical mapping and even if it can't it's actually no that hard to do in software either. Since this is a feature provided more or less on a hardware/firmware level  or can be done in software no special optimization is actually needed for this "OS feature".

[Tomatodude95]

2 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

If and only if it's a known processor. Linux for example gets patched for every new hardware families, and if you use a kernel that hasn't been updated with supporting code, it usually works, but not exactly as it should. Basically working in "compatibility" mode/minimum set of required features.

Ok that might be true, but do you know if that would result in an error/warning message popping up at or after boot? I however still believe that XeonPhy is a know Family, even if only because of the PCIE compute cards, that use the same architecture.

[HiddenFox]

The fact that you didn't even check the task manager to see what the CPU was doing or even have GPU-Z or an overlay on the game to see what was happening was really disappointing. I was expecting Linus to attempt to optimise a game to get it to run better but he didn't even bother. Was it a core clock issue (most likely) was it a bandwidth limitation? Guess we will never know. Content is really lacking these days Linus. Probably the shallowest video I've seen to date. Disappointed

[Hunter259]

2 hours ago, MrShinny said:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Intel-Xeon-Phi-5110P-1-053GHZ-225W-PCI-Express-60-CORE-Coprocessor-708360-001/382481766724?epid=27015261092&hash=item590db09944:g:CZAAAOSwxLVbFcUJ:sc:USPSFirstClass!28207!US!-1

 

Would that be one?

That is, again, a 5110P Knights Corner card. You can't get Knights Landing PCIE cards unless you know somebody. They are not generally available and it looks like the next generation of Xeon Phi is dropping it completely.

[danwat1234]

Are each of the Xeon Phi 7210 cores basically Skylake but clocked to 1.3/1.5GHZ? I tend to not believe this, because the computer seems to be operating much slower than a 1.5GHZ Skylake whatever#ofcores CPU. More like the IPC of a Pentium 4...

 

Seriously can it run Farcry smoothly? Don't even try Crysis.

 

Task Manager said:

5 sockets

196 cores

256 logical processors

That makes no sense to me. Logical should be double the # of cores and # of cores indicates 3 CPUs installed ... + 4 cores..

[Hunter259]

19 minutes ago, danwat1234 said:

Are each of the Xeon Phi 7210 cores basically Skylake but clocked to 1.3/1.5GHZ? I tend to not believe this, because the computer seems to be operating much slower than a 1.5GHZ Skylake whatever#ofcores CPU. More like the IPC of a Pentium 4...

 

Seriously can it run Farcry smoothly? Don't even try Crysis.

 

Task Manager said:

5 sockets

196 cores

256 logical processors

That makes no sense to me. Logical should be double the # of cores and # of cores indicates 3 CPUs installed ... + 4 cores..

Google is your friend.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

 

They are airmont Atom cores with 4 way hyper threading. If these were true Skylake cores the chip would have a MUCH higher TDP.

[Mira Yurizaki]

6 minutes ago, danwat1234 said:

Are each of the Xeon Phi 7210 cores basically Skylake but clocked to 1.3/1.5GHZ? I tend to not believe this, because the computer seems to be operating much slower than a 1.5GHZ Skylake whatever#ofcores CPU. More like the IPC of a Pentium 4...

The Xeon Phi they used is based on the Silvermont architecture.

6 minutes ago, danwat1234 said:

Task Manager said:

5 sockets

196 cores

256 logical processors

That makes no sense to me. Logical should be double the # of cores and # of cores indicates 3 CPUs installed ... + 4 cores..

Logical depends on the SMT implementation. For Knights Landing, it's four threads per core.

 

I don't know why Window's enumerating it like that.

[TopHatProductions115]

I think it's fair to say that a better explanation could have been given as to how efficient games are at utilising multi-core (6+ core) systems.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/is-that-the-reason-why-having-8cores-is-important-for-gaming.2500069/

 

As game engines and APIs become more 'job-based' and more multi-thread friendly, gaming performance should scale better on higher core-count systems. It's a software development issue. Software for vector (GPU) architectures and x86_64 are now in the same boat - go multi-threaded or go home. Tell me if I'm not getting this straight.

[Guest]

I see these hidden digs at Apple Linus. ??

[Mira Yurizaki]

5 hours ago, TopHatProductions115 said:

I think it's fair to say that a better explanation could have been given as to how efficient games are at utilising multi-core (6+ core) systems.

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/is-that-the-reason-why-having-8cores-is-important-for-gaming.2500069/

 

As game engines and APIs become more 'job-based' and more multi-thread friendly, gaming performance should scale better on higher core-count systems. It's a software development issue. Software for vector (GPU) architectures and x86_64 are now in the same boat - go multi-threaded or go home. Tell me if I'm not getting this straight.

The game the first few posts talks about, Project Cars, while a good example, is also not really representative of what's to come. The thing with Project Car is since it's a racing game and likely one with lots of cars, there needs to be multiple AI entities that act like a job. And it's an AI that likely has to do a lot more work in real time than say what a crowd does in GTA.

 

If there's anything I learned while looking into CPU performance, it's that having a lot of AI entities will start capping frame rates quickly.

[agent_x007]

Biggest CPU bottleneck I did so far : 

CPU bus (that connects it to RAM/chipset), is slower than PCI-e 1.x x16.
@GabenJr Can you show this to Linus ? 
I would like to know if it's slower than that Xeon Phi
Also, here's Fire Strike score : https://www.3dmark.com/fs/15587676
"Better than 3% of all results"... someone likes to be optimistic
Fire Strike Ultra (required 2GHz clock) : 
https://www.3dmark.com/fs/15492596