>> 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. > > for comaprision the tesla 2090 we have costed over 3k each - and provides 177 > GB/sec [with 6GB ram] > > http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla-servers.html
Oh, yes, that reminds me of one of the great moments of my GPU computing experience so far. We had a GTX 470 (~$400) in our test machine, but somehow hoping to get access to a Tesla because of the much higher double precision peak performance reported. We begged NVIDIA and they finally donated a Tesla 2050 for testing purposes. So, the day the board arrived, we were all excited about the expected extra punch for our iterative solvers to observe. What we ended up with was ~10% below the performance of the GTX 470 even in double precision, just because all these operations are so heavily memory-bandwidth limited. Also, for most simulations we carried out even the GTX 470 was sufficient, and when we really wanted to go to the limits of the work-station, the 3 GB on the Tesla wasn't enough either. Lesson learned. Best regards, Karli
