Author Topic: Intel Xeon Phi  (Read 4519 times)

2015-11-13, 08:37:56

Buzzz

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Hi all,

This product is good for Corona?

Who has tried it?

Regards
« Last Edit: 2015-11-13, 08:43:03 by Buzzz »

2015-11-13, 11:22:39
Reply #1

fire3d

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2015-11-13, 12:30:17
Reply #2

Nekrobul

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I do not kow exactly but i think that corona do not use GPU for calculations.
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2015-11-13, 14:58:16
Reply #3

maru

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Hi, we periodically receive questions about it. Currently not supported, no plans yet to support it. At the moment Corona is purely CPU-based.
Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
3D Support Team Lead - Corona | contact us

2015-11-13, 15:31:52
Reply #4

Buzzz

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Ok, Thanks for the comments.

2015-11-18, 13:23:58
Reply #5

Fritzlachatte

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I just realized, that a lot of the architecture has been redeveloped and it will be addressed as x86 cores and will work CPU based.
It is hard to imagine,that such an additional card will boost any non analyzing applications, but I would be great if I am wrong.
I was amazed when I read about those 10 Core Broadwell-EP CPUs but 76 cores sound theoretically thrilling an too nice to be true... :-)

2015-11-18, 21:31:41
Reply #6

Ryuu

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Although Xeon Phi (formerly Larrabee) has grown to have full-blown x86-64 cores, it's not as easy as plugging the card in your system and suddenly having 60 more CPU cores to play with. There are multiple issues a programmer has to deal with: asymmetric memory access, different instruction sets supported by the main processor and by the Xeon Phi cores and few others. The biggest issue is that Xeon Phi doesn't add more processors to your box, it is actually a standalone computer running Linux (which can share memory with the host computer).

Corona would have to run on Linux to be able to run on Xeon Phi. And in the end it probably wouldn't be much different from having a standalone powerful multicore machine used for distributed rendering.

There are few more implementation issues. There are 60 cores running at around 1.3 GHz, but each core is running 4 threads in parallel. So you actually have 240 threads, each running at 325 MHz. It can be a bit difficult for programmer to effectively juggle this many threads. Also to effectively use the available performance, Corona would have to be adapted to utilize the 512-bit AVX3/AVX-512 instruction set (a subset of which is also supported by the new Skylake Xeon processors).

Don't get me wrong, I would love to get my hands on this Intel beast and have an opportunity to play with it and bend Corona to its will. But I also believe that there are still many more other optimization opportunities which will benefit all users (there are not that many who can afford to buy Xeon Phi).