On 11/12/2012 06:08 PM, Barry Smith wrote: > >> >> In terms of raw numbers, $2,649 for 320 GB/sec and 8 GB of memory is quite a >> lot compared to the $500 of a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition at 288 GB/sec and 3 >> GB memory. My hope is that Xeon Phi can do better than GPUs in kernels >> requiring frequent global synchronizations, e.g. ILU-substitutions. > > But, but, but it runs the Intel instruction set, that is clearly worth 5+ > times the price :-)
I'm tempted to say 'yes', but at a second thought I'm not so sure whether any of us is actually programming in x86 assembly (again)? Part of the GPU/accelerator hype is arguably due to a rediscovery of programming close to hardware, even though it was/is non-x86. With Xeon Phi we might now observe some sort of compiler war instead of low-level kernel tuning - is this what we want? Best regards, Karli
