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  • Yojimbo - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link

    Intel has announced the death of Xeon Phi, and it sounds like what they will come out with in its stead will be significantly different. I'd be very surprised if we hear about KNM at next year's Supercomputing. It sounds like someone started with a research project and then continued on with it, presumably because there may be some use to its explorations other than what applies specifically to Xeon Phi.
  • Ian Cutress - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link

    As far as I can tell, the AP line replaces the Xeon Phi line in that segment in Intel's roadmaps. Except without the MCDRAM.
  • Yojimbo - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link

    What are their plans for the AP line? Will the A21 Supercomputer really be made with something like Cascade Lake-AP? From the way Intel talked a few months back, whatever Intel is using to try to win the A21 contract (which seems to be theirs to win as long as they come up with something satisfactory) sounded a bit more radical than Cascade Lake-AP. And it shouldn't be like Xeon Phi, because otherwise there would be no reason to be so dramatic about the whole thing. They could have just canceled Knights Hill and delayed Aurora, bringing out another Xeon Phi later. Announcing the death of Xeon Phi when it's not really dying would only serve to create instability in the ecosystem.

    But I didn't mean that the research was applicable to anything concrete coming out. The researchers presumably have no idea of what will come out. I just meant that perhaps their findings can be applied to other architectures somehow. I dunno, I didn't look at the poster at all.
  • ken.c - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link

    We received a KNL evaluation system from a particular vendor that starts with D last year. Sadly, it was pretty much a bare board in a chassis, and the only way to get it to boot was off of a usb key. We've never been able to get them to send us either the cables or the card for any other storage interface. It's an utterly dead platform.
  • Ian Cutress - Monday, November 19, 2018 - link

    Is there not even a SATA port? What about PCIe storage?
  • Ej24 - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link

    Knights landing with 68 x86 cores at what, 1.2GHZ, was considered extremely niche just a year or two ago but soon we'll have Epyc with 64 cores and usable clock speeds. Not a niche coprocessor but a full on socketed server/workstation cpu. My how times have changed.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link

    But each of the KNL cores has two AVX-512 pipes, while EPYC 7 nm (Rome?) has only dual 256-bit pipes.

    As we've learned from GPUs, the race for energy efficient compute is generally won by wider architectures at lower clocks.
  • jospoortvliet - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link

    Sure, but those AVX pipelines are only useful in specific scenarios - in general in cases where GPUs do well, too. EPYC will perform well in a wide range of scenarios and can be paired with accelerators using its massive array of PCI Express lanes. I agree with ej24 That KNL and the likes look a little obsolete now.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, November 20, 2018 - link

    I was just pointing out that even @ 64 cores, new EPYC is not exactly following the path of Xeon Phi.

    Where KNL failed was trying to beat GPUs at their own game. However, the introduction of the AP line suggests that Intel stumbled upon applications hungry for higher-density of general purpose cores.

    I wonder how sustainable the path of higher core counts really is. Cache coherence will eat your perf/W.
  • Daniellephillips - Thursday, December 13, 2018 - link

    Intel acquired Nervana Systems for its algorithms as opposed to its processor designs. As the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Mill processors and coprocessors are required to be discharged in 2017, I expect that the vast majority of the designing work for Knights Mill would have been finished, so there's no sense in not discharging Knights Mill on calendar. The key parts of the Nervana Engine would have been incorporated into Knights Mill. With best regards, https://www.ukassignment.co.uk/

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