Intel 5110P Phi coprocessor

[tydraestor]

Would it be worth getting a second hand coprocessor? And what would be the uses of this card?

[NTDaws]

The good thing about Xeon Phi is that each of the 50-61 cores contains its own 512-bit vector unit.

Thus, multiplying the number of cores, the SIMD degree of parallelism and the frequency together, gives a very high total floating point processing throughput (measured in teraflops, or 10**12 floating point instructions per second).

This processing throughput is quoted as the "theoretical peak" throughput, because in reality only a certain fraction of that throughput can be utilized.

A high floating point processing throughput is valuable for those who need such processing power. It can be harnessed for commercial, academic and military research.

In order to benefit from Intel Xeon Phi, you will need programmers who write programs that are specifically optimized to run well on Xeon Phi. Without tuning (or rewriting critical parts of the code), it is unlikely to realize the peak processing throughput.

[SLAYR]

48 minutes ago, tydraestor said:

Would it be worth getting a second hand coprocessor? And what would be the uses of this card?

No.

 

The compatability requirements to run one are extremely limited.

 

https://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2015-08-01/xeon-phi-knights-corner-compatible-motherboards/

 

In short, unless you have a specific Gigabyte, Asrock, or Asus lga 2011/2011-3 board the coprocessor will not work without modding the bios, and hoping for the best.

 

Then there is software support for it. Basically the xeon phi isn't just a CPU with lots of cores, but an entire seperate computer with its own ram, and OS on it.

Only certain programs offer support. MATLAB had support through an intel kernel.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-intel-math-kernel-library-with-mathworks-matlab-on-intel-xeon-phi-coprocessor-system

 

The uses are anywhere where you have programs that can use massive amounts of threads (100+) and the performance can scale accordingly. Anything lower and you should look at regular xeon cpus.