Intel unveils PCIX-based coprocessor
November 12, 2012 —
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Intel today announced that it will begin to offer a new coprocessing unit to developers in late January. Known as the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor, this 60-core PCIX card allows developers to push extra processor power into their high-performance applications without having to learn a new development environment and language, such as nVidia's CUDA or the up-and-coming OpenCL.
James Reinders, chief evangelist and director of marketing for Intel's software development products, said that the Phi offers many advantages over typical GPU compute.
“We've seen a phenomenon where people have taken GPUs and found they can take a sliver of the HPC market, and can also see performance advantages per watt,” he said. “That gave us inspiration that the interest is there at taking on certain workloads, but we think that there's a great opportunity here to design a device that's more programmable, more flexible.”
To wit, Reinders said that GPU computing is limited by the capabilities of the GPU itself. Those cards and chips were designed to do only geometric computation. That means GPUs are extremely limited in how they compare to a standard x86 processor.
“I never like to say 'hard' or 'easy' to describe programming,” said Reinders. “Writing in CUDA is pretty restrictive because of the restrictions the hardware has. You see some of the queues they're putting in to give a little more flexibility. I think those baby steps aren't going to solve the problem well enough. The hardware needs to be very flexible.”
Reinders said that Phi will work with parallel applications as well as those built using Intel development tools, such as Threaded Building Blocks and Intel Cluster Studio XE. “If you look at Cluster Studio XE, it's aimed at people using OpenMP and MPI. We're continuing to try to support those sorts of standards. We'll continue investing heavily in that. That's where most of the action is.”
All of this brings up a major question, however, about the standards and tools being used in HPC. While MPI and OpenMP continue to evolve, AMD and nVidia have sought new standards to support their GPU computing capabilities. AMD has embraced OpenCL, and is now pushing to include support for GPU compute in Java itself.
Related Search Term(s): HPC, Intel
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