Chaos Corona for 3ds Max > [Max] General Discussion

Will Corona take advantage of announced Xeon Phi accelerator ?

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Dom74:
intel has announced the Xeon Phi accelerator :

http://pro.clubic.com/entreprises/intel/actualite-521991-intel-xeon-phi.html

Do you think Corona will/can take advantage of this hardware ?

Ondra:
Hi,
that depends on how much will it cost and how big speedup could be achieved. But it might be more viable than GPUs ;)

Dom74:

Xeon Phi 3100 :
Disponibility first half of 2013,
nb. of core : unknow - 6 Go GDDR5 RAM - bandwith 240 Go/s - de 1000 Gigaflops in double precision - 225 watts  TDP - no price for now, but expected lower than 2000 $.

Xeon Phi 5110P :
Disponibility 28 january 2013,
60 x86 cores  - 8 Go GDDR5 RAM -  bandwith 320 Go/s - 1010 Gigaflops in double precision - 300 Watts  TDP - price 2649 $

Both can run X86 standard code, no need to re-write, so, eventually, compatible with all X86 softwares (?!)

Ondra:
6/8 GB memory is too little, 16/32 would be better :/. The price is ok-ish.

Gigaflops are largely unrelated measure of performance - if we were able to milk all gflops from current desktop CPUs, we could already render everything in real time.

The "can run x86, omgwtflol" is also more of a marketing advantage - you still need different binaries of your programs, because it does not have SSE (so you cannot directly runy ANY existing modern code with floating point operations). But binaries are produced by the compiler automatically, so I could in theory take corona and easily port it to PowerPC, ARM, smartphones, etc. What counts is the way you need to write the code to get acceptable speed. This is the reason GPU programming is hard. Even though you can write your programs with the same C++ syntax as when programming for CPU, you have to write it entirely differently. And I do not know how vast changes would be needed to milk the xeon phi ;).

Dom74:
so, it was too good to be true...
Too sad.
Wait and see...

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