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Westmere-EP to Sandy Bridge-EP: The Scientist Potential Upgradeby Ian Cutress on 3/4/2013 9:30 AM EST
- Posted in
- CPUs
- Xeon
- Westmere-EP
- Sandy Bridge-EP
44 Comments
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SatishJ - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkIt would be only fair to compare X5690 with E5-2667. I suspect in this case the performance difference would not be earth-shattering. No doubt E5-2690 excels but then it has advantage of more cores / threads. Reply
wiyosaya - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkThere is a possible path forward for those dealing with "old" FORTRAN code. CUDA FORTRAN - http://www.pgroup.com/resources/cudafortran.htm
I would expect that there would be some conversion issues, however, I would also expect that they would be lesser than converting to C++ or some other CUDA/openCL compliant language.
As much as some of us might like it to be, FORTRAN is not dead, yet! Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Monday, March 04, 2013 - link1. Why not use 7Zip for the compression benchmark ? Most HPC people would like to use a FREE, Highly threaded software for their work.
2.Using 3770K @ 5.4 Ghz as a comparison point is foolish. Any Ivy bride processor above ~4.6 on air is unrealistic. And for HPC, no body will use a overclocked system. Reply
Senti - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkWinRar is interesting because it's very sensitive to memory subsystem (7zip is less so), but 3.93 is absolutely useless as it utilizes about half of my cpu time and the end result it turns into powersaving impact benchmark before anything else. AT promised to upgrade sometime this year, but before it we'll continue to have one less useful benchmark.
Not overclocking your cpu when you have good cooling is plain waste of resources. Of course I mean not extreme overclocks, but permanent maximum "turbo" frequency should be your minimum goal. Reply
SetiroN - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkSorry but...
-So what?
Being "sensitive to memory" doesn't make a worse benchmark better, or free;
-So what?
Nobody will ever have good enough cooling to be able to compute daily at 5.4, which is FAR above max turbo anyway. Overclocked results are welcome, provided that I don't need an additional $500 phase change cooler and $100+ in monthly bills. Reply
tynopik - Monday, March 04, 2013 - link> Being "sensitive to memory" doesn't make a worse benchmark better, or free;
It makes it better if your software is also sensitive to memory speed
different benchmarks that measure different aspects of performance are a GOOD thing Reply
Death666Angel - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkThe OC CPU I see as a data point for his statement that some workloads don't require multi socket CPU systems but rather a single high IPC CPU. It may or may not be unrealistic for the target demographic, but it does add a data point for or against such a thing. Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - link1. WinZip 3.93 has been part of my benchmark suite for the past 18 months (so lots of comparison numbers can be scrutinized), and is the one I personally use :) We should be updating to 4.2 for Haswell, though going back and testing the last few years of chipsets and various processors takes some time.
2. My inhouse retail CPU does 4.9 GHz on air, easy :) But most of the OC numbers are courtesy of several HWBot overclockers at Overclock.net who volunteered to help as part of the testing. For them the bigger score the better, hence the overclocks on something other than ambient.
Ian Reply
mayankleoboy1 - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkHow many real world workloads are using hand-coded AVX software ?
How many use compiler optimized AVX software ?
What is the perf difference between them?
Not directly related to this article, but how many softwares have the AMD Bulldozer/piledriver optimised FMA and BMI extensions ? Reply
Kevin G - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkWhat is going on with the Explicit Finite Difference tests? The thing that stood out to me are the two results for the i7 3770K at 4.5 Ghz with memory speed being the differentiating factor. Going from 2000 Mhz to 2600 Mhz effective speed on the memory increased performance by ~13% in the 2D tests and ~6% in the 3D tests. Another thing worth pointing out is that the divider in Ivy Bridge has higher throughput than Sandy Bridge. This would account for some of the exceedingly high performance of the desktop Ivy Bridge systems if the algorithms make heavy use of division. The dual socket systems likely need some tuning with regards to their memory systems. The results of the dual socket systems are embarrassing in comparison to their 'lesser' single socket brethen.
The implicit 2D test is similarly odd. The odd ball result is the Core i7 firstname.lastname@example.com Ghz against the Ivy bridge based Core i7 3770k@stock (3.5 Ghz). Despite the higher clock speed and extra memory channel, the consumer Sandy Bridge-E system loses! This is with the same number of cores and threads running. Just how much division are these algorithms using? That is the only thing that I can fathom to explain these differences. Multi-socket configurations are similarly nerfed with the implicit 2D test as they are with the explicit 2D test.
Did the Browian Motion simulations take advantage of Ivy Bridge's hardware random number generator? Looking at the results, signs are pointing toward 'no'.
I'm a bit nitpicky about the usage of the word 'element' describing the n-Body simulation with regards to gravity. The usage of element and particle are not technically incorrect but lead the reader to think that these simulations are done with data regarding the microscopic scales, not stellar.
The Xilisoft Video Converter test results seem to be erroneous. More than doubling the speed by enabling Hyperthreading? How is that even possible? Best case for Hypthereading is that half of the CPU execution resources are free so that another thread can utilize them and get double the throughput. HT rarely gets near twice as fast but these results imply five times faster which is outside the realm of possibility with everything else being equal. Scaling between the Core i7-3960k and the dual E5-2690 HT Off result looks off given how the results between other platforms look too. Reply
jamyryals - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkElement is an acceptable term in this case. Anyone confusing a finite element with a chemical element would do well to read up on these types of mathematical models anyways.
Your other points are well made, and highlight the difficulty in creating meaningful benchmarks. Reply
Kevin G - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkI agree that the usage of the word element is technically correct. The thing that threw me off more was its usage in conjunction with particle. When I read that paragraph I had to do a double take to get the proper context. My issue here is just a small editorial quibble than a technical issue. :) Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkA majority of the results in the graphs (essentially all the overclocked ones) were on systems out of my control - several users from the Overclock.net HWBot team helped on that one and offered me insight into their setups. Unfortunately I do not have access to a vast array of sockets and systems for comparison.
The implicit calculations have a fair few division elements per loop, as noted in the previous article where I posted the code (http://www.anandtech.com/show/6533/8) - for each timestep there are >2 divisions per node calculation. Technically the non-CS scientist might not know what is inside the silicon regarding Ivy's better divisor .
Don't forget the whole point of a review of something like this was to look at the scenario I was in. We went and ordered dual Nehalem systems (E5520s) just because of all the threads. Looking back on it now, I wish we had stuck to single processor systems based on the code we were writing.
Regarding the built-in Ivy PRNG, as noted in the previous review, the code wasn't hand written for each processor. It was written once and applied over. We didn't get extra time or money to find the best way to simulate something, we just had to simulate.
Regarding element and particle, I almost use them synonymously in the text. I like to use 'element' to describe the motion of one point in the simulation, but my Chemistry supervisor thought I was being an idiot when we were dealing with chemicals, despite my pleas that element was a CS term. He preferred the term particle as a mid-way point between the two (and also not to confuse the chemistry people reading our papers) and mentally I have equated the two, which is not always the best thing.
For XVC, I'm not sure why there is such a difference. With HT On, we have 24 threads to do 33 videos, which is one batch of 24 then another of 9 (put your turbos in where appropriate). Without HT, we're slightly faster per core (if we're lucky, or 0 if not), but we have batches of 12, 12 and then 9. Again, apply turbos where appropriate. That's just the program runs - it decides if it wants to commit one thread per video, or multiple threads per video. If it is coding more videos than half the available threads, it does one thread per video - if there is enough threads that each video can get two, it applies two. So the set of 9 videos when HT is on probably gets two threads per video, rather than one thread per video for the 9 videos when HT is off.
Ian Reply
Kevin G - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThe thing with Ivy Bridge's improved division unit is that it can explain some of the speed up. Glancing at the code, those operations don't seem to be that common that it'd make such a noticeable impact. (The real test would be to compile, disassemble and then count the number of division instructions.) The other thing about Ivy Bridge's divisor is that its performance gains are 'free' in the sense that it doesn't require rewriting or recompiling code to take advantage of. It is an architectural tweak that benefits existing code.
Upon release, Nehalem was a very good platform and still respectable today. I think the issue is that consumer systems have been catching up. Looking at the charts the only consumer system that's a roughly the same age as the E5520's was an overclocked Phenom II X4's and the dual socket Xeon showed an advantage there. The problem I'm seeing is that the code isn't scaling across multiple sockets and memory controllers very well. Solving that would put performance closer to expectations. If possible, I would suggest enabling memory mirroring across sockets to see if that solves some of the scaling issues. The code wouldn't have to be written to be NUMA aware but usable memory in the system is halved.
If the NUMA problem is not practical to solve, then going single socket makes sense. Howevever, I would expand the discussion into include RAS. I would not recommend a single highly overclocked system to run scientific simulations as the reliability simply isn't there. One way around that is to get two similarly configured systems and run the simulation twice and compare the results for redunancy. With some of these heavily overclocked systems costing less than half the dual Xeon's price tag and running the code twice as fast, it is worth considering such a mirrored configuration. Other options to consider would be a single 8 core Xeon on socket 2011 or some of the quad core Xeon on socket 1155 and gain ECC memory support to forgo the second system.
The XVC results can see some improvements in queuing but those benefits should be able to carry over to the non-HT results with a software tweak. (Most software like that can accept such tuning parameters but I'm personally unfamiliar with XVC.) The results are falling outside the realm of reason. It is like say cooling a gas until you realize you're at -20 kelvin. At that point you have to realize something is erroneous. At best HT can double performance and the results are roughly five times faster. Turbo is a factor but that would benefit the non-HT results more as utilization is lower (ie. fewer transistors switching, less heat, more turbo boost). Reply
toyotabedzrock - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkI looks like Intel forgot about HT on sandy bridge. Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linki5-2500K is a 4C/4T processor.
Ian Reply
TeXWiller - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkIan, have you tried playing with the numa options of the boards? Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkNUMA was enabled in the BIOS, I made sure before I tested :) I also looked at various ways to keep the top turbo in force through all loading, but the limited BIOS options relating to clock speed on server boards are not up to scratch compared to consumer products (as you would expect).
Ian Reply
TeXWiller - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkI was thinking about the improved bandwith between the processors in E5 family. Some aplications might prefer node interleaved memory instead. Reply
alpha754293 - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkre: OpenMP vs. MPI
Multithreaded codes using OpenMP is known to be quite a lot slower than a proper, MPI code. In the testing that I've done, the difference can be as much as 40% because the OpenMP code just simply cannot keep the CPU/FPU units occupied long enough. I've never really dug in deep as to WHY that is (I'm sooo NOT a programmer), but as an end user; that a HUGE difference.
Secondly, also depending on how you write your MPI code - some of them can be VERY efficient at using multicore/multiprocessors. It depends on the code, the nature and physics of the problem, and a whole bunch of other things. (LS-DYNA for example scales VERY well to the number of processors and/or cores. And my research is showing about an 11-17% benefit with HTT enabled on a 3930K (I don't have 8-core Xeons to play with). :(
Conversely, I've also seen some MPI codes that don't really quite parallelize nearly quite as well. It SAYS that it's MPI, but it looks more like an OpenMP implementation for the parallelization.
Part of it also depends on how much data dependency there is - does the information of one depend on the results or the information/data of another (either on spatial or temporal terms)?
Third - I've had many arguments about this. A single socket, multi-core processor is still a parallel multicore system. Yes, you don't have to deal with NUMA, but unless you have a LOT of traffic going through between your two sockets (something which NO ONE has been able to tell me how to measure so far) - chances are, both either OpenMP OR MPI can scale to single multi-core processor, or multiple multi-core processors. It shouldn't really care (unless you've hard-coded the domain decomposition and the number of "partitions" or "divisions" it makes for the parallelization.)
I think that the statement/comment that you wrote about how some of the benchmarks or some types of simulations/processes favour a single-CPU setup isn't QUITE exactly accurate only because your single-socket, multi-core CPUs were quite highly overclocked. (I've got my 3930K up to 4.5 GHz, and I just re-enabled C1E/EIST in order to cut my idle power consumption).
[brb...to be continued] Reply
alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkSorry, I'm back. Where was I? oh yes...
Unless that you were purely running single-threaded, single process jobs (or maybe even lightly multithreaded, single process jobs) - I would think that to say that it is favouring a single-CPU system might be a little bit misleading.
Even with single-socket systems, if it's got multiple cores, then you can parallelize amongst those as well.
Some commercial programs too favour 2^n cores as well, which would make quite a difference between having 8- or 16-cores vs. 6 or 12 (because some programs won't even run properly if it isn't 2^n).
Also it was interesting to see that you didn't run the implicit 3D grid solver benchmark.
Actually, MPI might not has as much to do with memory than you might think. Considering that the world's top supercomputers haven't maxed out the memory capacity per socket, I doubt that. It IS, however, much better at the actual parallelization of the task than OpenMP.
"'Is moving from Westmere-EP to Sandy Bridge-EP a reasonable upgrade', in the majority of our scenarios it probably is not"
It really depends. If you're writing your own code (which is what you're doing), and you have a lot of control over it, then that MIGHT be a true statement. (And it also depends on the state of your code too. If you're almost always in a permanent alpha phase (because you keep adding new capability and modules to it), then chances are, you might not even get around to parallelizing it (because you want to make sure that the base solver is robust first before you add the additional complexity of parallelization on top of that).
But if, say, suppose that you're doing research on crash and crash safety; and you're using a commercial code - some of those would just favour more cores period (see Johan's latest benchmark on the Opteron for details).
And as to whether or not you can run it on a GPU; the problem with that is that you have to make sure that every system in your working/research group has the same capable GPU hardware; otherwise, those that don't can't even run it, and those that have lesser-capable GPUs - might not get the benefits of using a GPU as much as you think, if at all.
(My GTX 660 OC's double precision performance is actually slightly SLOWER than the double precision performance of my 3930K OC'd to 4.5 GHz.) Reply
alpha754293 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkAlso, as far as I know/can remember - not everything can make use of AVX - both in terms of programs and also in terms of fundamental math operations.
And I would suspect that you might also have slight performance variations if you were to recompile on the Sandy Bridge vs. on the Westmere-EP platforms (rather than sharing the binaries between the two - unless you purposely don't make it target specific). Reply
wingless - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkSomebody on my folding team is building this setup with dual Titans as a folding/gaming rig. The ultimate in computation, gaming, and space heating! Reply
yougotkicked - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkI just wanted to say I found this analysis rather interesting. I'm a undergrad CS major, but I work in the IT office for the chemical engineering and material science dept. at a research university, so this breakdown of the relationship between simulations and hardware was really fascinating for me.
Just to give some perspective on the pricing of an OEM-built system using E5-26XX parts, one of the research groups I work with recently bought a dual E5-2687W system from HP with 128 gigs of ram, liquid cooling, and a mid-range workstation GPU; The whole system came in at over $10,000. admittedly this includes a ~$1000 monitor and 4 hard drives, but this is probably at least a 30% margin over the cost of hardware, so the 10% margin used in the article may be on the conservative side.
P.S. we didn't suggest that system to the researchers, they bought it on their own. Reply
colonelpepper - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkHP & Dell systems are much more expensive than the same system built by a "system integrator" <-- I believe that's what they're called
I've read in other forums that system integrators building you a custom system add about 10% to the price tag. Reply
yougotkicked - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkThat sounds reasonable, my only gripe would be that many researchers would not seek out a system integrator and just turn to a big name like HP. Had they sought the advice of the IT office I would have suggested we build it in-house for no markup at all. Reply
Kevin G - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkDell and HP's workstation lines carry a much higher premium than what you'd get DIY. The difference is in their warranties. Since dual socket workstations are effectively using low end servers in a tower chassis and they'll offer warranties very similar to what you can get for a 24/7/365 running server. While I'm not a big fan of Dell's hardware, I will say that they do follow through on their warranties. I've seen them get a replacement hard drive to my facility in under 4 hours as that is the level of support I was paying for. It wasn't cheap but it was worth it considering the business need.
With the scientific slant, such warranties may turn out to be overkill as is going with OEM's. You'd still want to have the necessary data protections in place like ECC memory, redundant storage and a good backup policy while the simulation is running. However, what is the worst case that could happen when something does go wrong with the basic protections in place? Generally it is simply running the simulation again. Time is money and there are often some deadlines to meet. So if the simulation can't realistically be run again or it'd cost to much to run again, then going with an OEM that'll help achieve greater uptime is worth it.
As for the price of some of these components individually, I'm about to drop ~$1000 USD on a 128 GB memory upgrade. OEM's like Dell and HP get such parts far cheaper than DIY users due to bulk purchasing power. It is far higher than 10% margin for them in terms of raw hardware costs. Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkThe dual E5520 systems from Dell (with 4GB RAM because research department limited us to XP 32-bit) I used for research, with basic storage and a monitor each, ran up to £2k per order back in 2009. After a month of waiting to be delivered (after tons of initial hassle with the department IT guy), it turns out the systems arrived shortly after ordering and our IT guy had decided to hide them in a different building on campus and 'forgot to tell us'. The monitors were in a building the other side of campus. Fun fun fun! Needless to say, we were all rather annoyed. But looking back, I should have just asked for a single powerful Xeon workstation. Reply
yougotkicked - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkYikes, sounds like your IT guy needs to get his act together. We'd never get away with that kind of stuff here.
My university has a few super-computing clusters available for researchers running truly large simulations, but because of that many groups choose not to buy systems powerful enough to run their mid-sized simulations and the clusters are usually booked a while in advance. The HP system was purchased primarily because the group was sick of waiting for their simulations to get a turn on the supercomputers.
If only there were a folding@home style client that researchers could easily program for, we could turn our computer labs into compute clusters at night. Reply
colonelpepper - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkThis would be a very poor time to spend thousands of dollars on a high-end 2600 CPUs!
The Xeon 2600 series is getting a refresh soon, better to wait and get more CPU for your buck... unless you're dying to spend big $$ now that is:
that link is to the largest image I could find of Intel's Xeon Roadmap that was leaked late last year Reply
Kevin G - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkIvy Bridge-E is a drop in replacement so that investment into RAM, storage, motherboard, chassis would be identical to today. The transition between Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E will mirror the transition between Nehalem and Westmere: socket compatible drop-in replacements in most cases. Reply
colonelpepper - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkyeah, what i was thinking might be a decent route to take is to build out a workstation with 2 of the lower end more moderately priced Xeon 2600's... save the big $$ for the new chips. Reply
Shadowmage - Monday, March 04, 2013 - linkYour current suite of benchmarks is extremely limited for you to be able to call this a review for "scientists". For example, I'm interested in how these processors perform in Xilinx XST/MAP/PAR and simulation (e.g. Gem5) benchmarks. Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkOf course - any review aimed at scientists is going to be extremely limited. Forgive me when I can only represent where I have come from - I haven't done research in every field.
Ian Reply
Simen1 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWouldnt it be fair to compare the Dual Xeon systems to a similar priced dual Opteron system? Reply
Simen1 - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkAnd the mentioning of the 3 year old Opteron 6100 and 1,5 year old 6100 on the first page is irellevant now in 2013. Todays models are in the 6300 series. Reply
IanCutress - Thursday, March 07, 2013 - linkIf we get a dual Opteron 6300 system in, we will compare. Reply
plext0r - Tuesday, March 05, 2013 - linkWould have been nice to throw in some bigadv work units from the Folding@Home project to see how the systems compare. Reply
Michael REMY - Wednesday, March 06, 2013 - linkhi !
i really thought it is unfair and un-objectif to not include one of the E3-1290V2 or xeon E5-1620 in your test. Why (the hell) the i7-3770 do in you "profesional server" comparaison test ?
E3-1290V2 and E5-1620 are the higher clock and newer xeon ! you should put them in the race !
best regard Reply
IanCutress - Thursday, March 07, 2013 - linkIt's all about the equipment we have to hand. We don't have every CPU ever created. Plus, putting in consumer CPUs lets everyone know the playing field.
Ian Reply
nadana23 - Sunday, March 10, 2013 - linkIt's a pity you didn't read my reply to the previous article...
Your memory setup is the constraining factor here.
Add another 8pcs DIMM to your setup next time - you're bandwidth starving the E5-26xx memory controller! Reply
IanCutress - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkHow so? Each channel on both processors is populated by one DIMM. Moving to two DIMMs per channel won't make a difference, they're still fed by the same channel. Reply
sking.tech - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 - linkThe comments about people berating the Titan GPU - the titan is slower in overall performance than the GTX 690 yet they are at the same price point. That's kind of ridiculous. Why would someone pay more for less? Reply
ipheegrl - Thursday, May 23, 2013 - linkI would upgrade from Westmere-EP if it weren't for the fact that it was the last line of Xeons that could overclock. Granted, some people want guaranteed stability so overclocking isn't an option, but for budget users who want performance at the price of decreased stability it's a viable solution. Reply


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AMD Announces ATI Mobility Radeon 5000 Seriesby Jarred Walton on 1/7/2010 12:01 AM EST
- Posted in
- Laptops
32 Comments
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tntomek - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkDoes anyone have a hint if these are immediately available? Dell is already selling the new i5 chips but still old video cards.
Also does anyone have a hint of how the video card works in something like a dell. is the Intel onboard video totally disabled? Reply
RobotHunter - Saturday, January 09, 2010 - linkI just ordered one yesterday with a $300 off coupon from HP. Core i5 with the 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5830. Reply
bennyg - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkThis is what you get when the other mob is rehashing years old tech.
An evolutionary step thats just "enough" to be better, but much below its potential. Reply
pcfxer - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkYou mean AMD? Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkAMD is the parent company, but ATI is the group within AMD making the GPUs, and the GPUs are still called the "ATI Mobility Radeon". So pretty much you can say AMD or ATI and it's correct. Reply
SlyNine - Saturday, January 09, 2010 - linkI think some people tried to transition to saying AMD, but to many were stuck in there own ways and have an infinity for ATI. I know I feel that way, Otho I like Nvidia too. Both companies seem to be the epitome of free enterprise, they are very innovative without all the price fixing, unfair business practices and bullcrap you see in other industries. Reply
apriest - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkI have spent the last two months in driver hell trying to get two external monitors hooked up to an HP 4510s laptop with a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 for an accounting firm. The laptop has an analog and HDMI output, but you can't use both at the same time. So that leaves USB-based DisplayLink adapters. DisplayLink drivers are the worst on the planet and conflict with HP's video driver. You can't use ATI's official driver without hacking it first with Mobility Modder. If you do that, HP's QuickLaunch application will blue screen. If you remove QuickLaunch, you can't control whether your laptop screen or the other ATI video output is the primary screen, nor can you turn the secondary display on/off. Argh! There is no end to the frustration!
My simple point is, I can't WAIT to have the simplicity of my desktop's triple head ATI 5870 on a laptop using official ATI drivers. If vendors finally allow at least two digital outputs at the same time as the internal screen using official ATI drivers, it will be nervana for some of my clients! Reply
Pessimism - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkThe problem is with the users not the laptops. For one, I find it hard to justify two monitors let alone three, that is what alt-tab is for. Your brain/eyes can't focus on more than one monitor at a time anyway. People who think multi-display lets them become some superhuman multitasker are fooling themselves. If they still demand three monitors, they should be using a desktop not a laptop.
The0ne - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkI think most users wouldn't have the need for a 2nd or even 3rd monitor for their laptop use but in my case I must have a 2nd and more importantly bigger and larger resolution. My 17" laptop with 1920x1200 doesn't cut it with my spreadsheets. And although the resolution is nice things are tiny and while you can blow things up, that defeats the purpose of having more things in the same amount of space.
In addition to myself, I also set up dual monitors for technicians that use my spreadsheets specifically. It all comes down to being productive. Reply
SlyNine - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkTotal BS, If you believe you can only focus on one monitor at a time why don't you cut a 24 inch hole in a box that is about an arms length deep so all you can see through is the hole in the box.
Walk around like that and see how easy it is. Reply
Voo - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - link"The problem is not the laptop! Yeah sure you can't do that, but I don't need that, so nobody needs it!"
Great logic and it's always nice when someone tells other people what to do, because clearly he has to be right and it could not be that he just can't handle the added complexity of more monitors :p Reply
drunkenmaster - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkI really would rarely sign up to a site just to post a comment, but seriously, this article felt biased from the first paragraph.
Firstly as someone stated, OEM's want strict control over their laptops and want AMD to hand over drivers and let them deal with it.
Secondly you seem intent on giving the impression AMD is trying to tell us their market share is a lie, just look at the breakdown of what they sell. But you didn't highlight the fact that Nvidia's breakdown of gpu sales in the mobile area would look VERY similar, as both companies breakdowns would look in the desktop area. The biggest sales for both companies, is low end, then mid end, and high end is realistically a very small portion of their total sales. But its the way its worded, and not including Nvidia numbers, to try to intimate they haven't really been competing in high end gaming at all. Then you go on to say "but don't try to convince us that low-end discrete graphics (HD 4330 and GeForce 9300M/G110M, we're looking at you!) are anywhere near being good gaming solutions" , yes you mention an Nvidia solution but you also claimed further up that Nvidia has clearly dominated high end mobile gaming.
Hmm strange, further down the page you say high end mobile graphics are only 5% of the market, 5% of AMD's sales are high end, so logic would dictate in those magical Nvidia breakdowns you left out, that their share is only going to be 6-7% high end graphics. So wheres this domination exactly?
You also mention the reasons for this supposed, theoretical, unproven domination in the high end, the ease of changing from one core to the next, the 8800, 9800, 260/280.... you didn't seem to mention that they are all, essentially, the same core though. If AMD made a 3870, and kept making it but called it a 4870, and 5870, and 9870, it would be a pretty easy slot in upgrade also.
I just didn't like the whole feel of the article, you seem to suggest that AMD are trying to pull the wool over our eyes, AMD own 60% of the mobile market, so what, only 5% of that is gaming, Nvidia (without stating numbers) dominates here, and thats all that matters. Well, its not, 60% of the market is 60% of the market, thats kind of how life works. They sell more gpu's, infact their 5% high end sales could well be making them more profit(with smaller cores) than Nvidia's 6-7% sales in the high end, the rest of the range is almost certainly making them more profit, because they are selling more of them.
You also brought up the theoretical floppage ability of both cards, while the information isn't completely unaccurate or wrong, it just, with the tone of the rest of the piece had the same feeling, we're belittling AMD and trying to not focus on the fact that, in reality, their mobile parts are faster.
Likewise the drivers, you say you have no problem, but crossfire is iffy, well Nvidia have had two big releases, Borderlands(an Nvidia title) and Dirt 2(amd title) ship without SLI support, as did, Crysis, and several others, yes AMD have crossfire support issues, so do Nvidia. Likewise the crossfire/sli segment of high end gaming is tiny, if both companies had high end mobile cards sales of 5%, crossfire/sli would be 0.0005%. But rather than wait and see if they improve drivers which you admit work for all but a handful of crossfire uses, are there any crossfire laptops? I've not seen one, nor looked for one, I guess Alienware and a few others do, but then they probably do update their drivers, sure a company that only sells intergrated might not update drivers every 3 months, do they need to, are those guys gaming? Anyway rather than wait to see if it improves its just jumping on them.
You focus on the tiny portion you CLAIM dont' have support, but thats the general trend of the article. Dissappointed to say the least as with Anandtech I always hoped to read articles without bias, with clear facts shown from which the conclusions are drawn and well, no thats it.
I honestly don't know, maybe AMD have a bunch of crossfire laptops, so point out that Manufacturer X makes model Y and crossfire support is terrible, their forums are full of unhappy users and they can't get new drivers.
You've put together that some laptop makers don't update drivers very often, and that AMD doesn't directly support them(as you've been shown mostly at the request of the oem's), but you didn't link either of those directly to people with crossfire issues, you put one fact in a possible problem with no actual link and carried it through the article as fact.
Like I said, I could be wrong, but its your job to show it, not hint at a problem early, and take that as fact later on. Reply
erple2 - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkI'm not so sure that there's as much bias as you say. Granted this article is about a press release, not a review of hardware in and of itself. Which means a significant part of the article is going to have to be necessarily conjecture.
I think it was also stated in the article that OEMs wanted control over drivers. Curiously, however (as pointed out in the article), NVidia doesn't really have the same restriction - they do release drivers fairly regularly that will work with most of their mobile GPUs, which may be much to OEMs frustration.
While market share is market share, the fact is that all makers (well, the other one) makes the vast majority of their sales on the low end. In the high end, just simply looking at the design wins tells us more of the story. If AMD's high end accounts for 5% of their market share, that's 3% of the total mobile market share that's taken by AMD's high end solutions. I don't know what NVidia's share is, but if it's 4% or 5%, that's a significant increase in the "market share of high end products" owned by NVidia.
BTW, if 6-7% of the total market share of all mobile products is high end NVidia solutions, and given that we _know_ that 3% of the high end mobile market share is AMD, then clearly, NVidia has 2x+ of the market share of AMD in the high end. I'd say that's domination.
I think that _because_ the 8800, 9800, 260 and 280 are the same basic chip, OEM's have less work to do to incorporate those solutions in their products, and therefore use them more often. Since that solution is _still_ considered "high end", OEM's using those designs (as they have been for the last couple of years) have less qualification work to do, and therefore are more likely to choose those chips in their "high end" laptops. Your point, then, about if AMD simply re-packaged the 3870 into the 48xx, 58xx or "98xx" therefore solidifies the point that Jarred was making.
Ultimately, the complaints of "lack of driver support" for AMD is, in fact, partially true - NVidia has gone ahead and started incorporating unified drivers for all mobility parts. AMD has not.
As far as I can tell, there are 2 laptops available with Crossfire capability, and both of those were linked in the original article. Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkTo the OP, I understand what you're saying, but I was just trying to put everything in perspective. ATI *does* make some very good hardware, and the HD 4870 was competitive and even FASTER than GTX 280M... when it had properly working drivers. My experience in testing laptops during the past several years is that NVIDIA's current mobile driver program is far, far better than ATI's program. And you know what? NVIDIA had to deal with the same crap that ATI is dealing with, namely that big OEMs want control over their drivers.
So NVIDIA started a team that makes sure each driver rollout for mobile contains all the necessary hooks for a bunch of different laptops (and granted, sometimes a driver still comes out that won't work with certain models for one reason or another). ATI is still shrugging and saying, "but this is what the OEMs want to do!" Well, screw the OEMs; what do the CUSTOMERS want ATI to do?
I said several years ago that I couldn't in good conscience recommend an NVIDIA gaming laptop until they got a better driver release program. (I believe it was a review of the Dell XPS M1710 or something similar where several new titles had issues due to old drivers.) I'm saying the same thing now for ATI. If your drivers are broken or outdated on a gaming laptop, you have for all intents and purposes a broken gaming laptop. You can't push DX11 hardware and then tell me the drivers aren't going to be broken when DX11 games start coming out.
So at the high-end, with their driver program, I'll take NVIDIA mobile GPUs in a heartbeat over ATI mobile GPUs. It's that simple. I've been burned too many times to feel otherwise. What's more, I've heard from READERS that feel exactly the same way (after buying an ATI gaming laptops). It was on the first page and I talked about it for a long time simply because it's important.
What I want is for ATI to follow NVIDIA and launch a mobile driver program where publicly available drivers are released at least quarterly. I don't care if they don't support IGP designs and every single lower-end laptop (i.e. 5400, 4500, and 4300 hardware), but if someone has a laptop with a 4600, 4800, 5600, 5700, or 5800 GPU they need to know that they'll get new drivers on a regular basis.
So tell me this: am I wrong to think that? Is it expecting too much, considering ATI's biggest competitor has done exactly that starting a couple years ago?
If all ATI has to offer at the high-end right now is 25% better performance than GTX 280M, I'd either wait to hear about ATI's new mobile driver program, wait to see what NVIDIA's next hardware will be, or just get an NVIDIA solution.
Bias? Perhaps, but it's exactly what I would recommend right now for gaming laptops. NVIDIA may not have functioning SLI support on every new game that ships, but at least you know there's a good chance they will have it within the next three months. Ask ASUS W90 owners how the CrossFire support is working if you want the other side of the story.
Finally, I'm just going to throw this out there: hacking drivers to make them install was possible with NVIDIA as well as ATI solutions. The problem is, optimizations are not all present in many cases. Every time I've used hacked drivers, my performance has dropped in most titles. It might fix one broken game that's a recent release, but it usually comes with 5% to 15% (sometimes more) performance drops elsewhere. I don't want to have to swap drivers every time I play a different game, and I don't think anyone else does either. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's ideal or without problems. When I get another ATI laptop, maybe I'll try it just to see how performance works... right now, the only ATI hardware I have is an HD 3200, so drivers aren't going to make a real difference. Reply
rjc - Sunday, January 10, 2010 - linkFrom here AMD Driver improvements coming over next few months:
- CrossFire X profiles per application will now be in a separate XML file that it will be possible to update independently of the driver itself
- If laptop manufacturers allow it, possibility of installing the Catalysts on a laptop in Vista and 7
Nvidia has the 3xx series of mobile parts but these are the same chips as previously sold under the 2xx banner maybe with a slightly increased clocks. Nvidia is working on Fermi derivative chips but they are not expected at best before the second half of the year
Finally here is a pcper article on nvidia making drivers available for laptops: http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=6565">http://www.pcper.com/comments.php?nid=6565
...it is dated Dec 18 2008, not nearly 2 years ago.
Rereading the above I sound like an apologist for ATI :( If you want to criticise the company the 4550 and 4670 renamed as 5 series parts would be a better target. Perhaps also not giving you any notebooks to test for the article - that's not very professional. Reply
JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 12, 2010 - linkI suppose "discussed" and "launched" are the difference with NVIDIA. I first heard about the mobile driver program at the end of 2007, and I first talked about it http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=327...">with the Gateway P-6831 FX. The first drivers to come out were round about the end of 2008, though, which makes me wonder how soon ATI can announce and then release drivers for their mobile driver program. Here's to hoping they do it faster/better than NVIDIA. Reply
Sbijman - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - link"We have no concerns about ATI's ability to do so on the desktop, but right now they don't have any mobile driver plan as far as we can tell, referring you instead to your notebook manufacturer."
There is a (not very official?) ATI mobile driver program, but it's OEMs that are messing it up. According to [url=http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php">http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php]Hardwareheaven[/url] they request ATI to not support the graphics boards in their laptops so they can manage their own drivers.
There is a way around it, which is to hack the bit of the driver that identifies your hardware, and enable it to install even though it doesn't officially that specific laptop. Hardwarehaven has a tool for this. Reply
Sbijman - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkCan't find the edit button :S
The tool is available at http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php">http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php Reply
Hauk - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkMan I just bought an i7/4670 laptop. Can these boards be had and swapped? Reply
SlyNine - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkI have the same question, I wish they would do a review on the Dell 1645(XPS 16 studio which is what I'm guessing you got as well) w/ I7 and 4670 1 gig.
I'd really like to know how that performs in comparison to other notebooks. Reply
Hauk - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkThat's exactly what I got. Here's what it does with Win 7 Index: http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q62/steelsix/De...">http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q62/steelsix/De...
Games run okay but with this res, medium settings at best on demanding titles. It needs a bit more and the 58xx card would do it me thinks.
I plan to investigate and will post any good details in the forum Reply
SlyNine - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkAre you aware of the throttling issues when plugged in with the 90watt AC power. Apparently it throttles down to very low clock speeds when using AC power and the laptop screen.
The Battery runs at full speed though. But Dell promises a fix.
Huge 250 page thread here, very helpfull as well. Reply
Hauk - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkMine works fine. On delivery I flashed to the latest bios, installed an Intel SSD, and reinstalled OS. Idles at 931 core, runs well. Reply
SlyNine - Saturday, January 09, 2010 - linkGlad to hear it, supposedly mine is on the way, but dell keeps switching from shipped to delivery preparation. But I've been reading plugged in to the 90 watt adapter that it throttles, have you checked it running prime 95 and some sort of video intensive task ( stay away from FurMark, that is potentially dangerous to your card) maybe a Windows game so you can eye your clock speeds. Reply
SlyNine - Saturday, January 09, 2010 - linkSorry meant to say a windowed game, not windows game Reply
SlyNine - Friday, January 08, 2010 - linkhttp://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=4...">http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=4... Reply
R3MF - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkis the midrange 56xx series a native 400 shader part, or is it cut down from ~480 original die?
keeping the low end 54xx series at 80 shaders is deeply disappointing. Reply
AlB80 - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - link1. Rumors say that 56xx or 55xx desktop parts will have 400sp.
2. RS880 (785G) have 40sp, thus 80sp with DX11 is not bad start for discrete card. Reply
R3MF - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - link1. cheers for the info
2. but we have had forty shaders in integrated from AMD for years now, and it has long since been surpassed by the nVidia 9300/Ion, and even surpassed by intels new clarksdale iGPU's
given that high end mobile gpu's have 800 shaders, and mid-range cards have 400, i should have hoped that the low end would at least have advanced to 160 shaders. Reply
zicoz - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkDoes this support bitstreamning like it's desktop brother? Reply
JarredWalton - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkAs far as I can tell, yes -- see slide #19 in the gallery. It states the chips support Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, AC-3 and DTS with up to 8 channels of 192KHz/24-bit audio. Reply
ltcommanderdata - Thursday, January 07, 2010 - linkI guess this means that no ATI DX11 notebooks will have double precision float capability which is disappointing considering their previous gen high-end notebook GPUs could do it. It's interesting that Juniper (RV840) doesn't support DP floats while it's immediate predecessor, the RV740 used in the Radeon 4770 and Mobility Radeon 4830 and 4860 were DP float capable.
Here's hoping that Apple will adopt at least the Mobility HD 5650 (15-19W TDP) in their next MacBook Pro refresh. The 8600M GT and 9600M GT had 23W TDPs I believe, making the Mobility HD 5730 (26W TDP) and Mobility HD 5750 (25W TDP) options as well. The Mobility HD 5750 would of course be ideal and the lower TDP than the Mobility HD 5730 is presumably due to the lower core clocks in the former which should be offset performance-wise by using GDDR5 rather than GDDR3 in the later. Reply


text:
Intel Announces Xeon Phi Family of Co-Processors – MIC Goes Retailby Ryan Smith on 6/19/2012 1:00 AM EST
54 Comments
Back to Article
Homeles - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkLooks like Intel's going to kick Nvidia while they're down... since they're lacking a competitive 28nm GPU when it comes to FP64.
Still, with Intel being a whole process node ahead, it's disappointing to see that they're only putting out a card roughly equivalent to the 7970. This is only the beginning of a new war, though. Reply
Khato - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIt's not roughly equivalent to the 7970 though. The Xeon Phi manages roughly 1 TFlops in actual performance (rmax) whereas the 7970 is roughly 1 TFlops in theoretical performance (rpeak.) For GPUs, rmax is typically ~60% of rpeak. Reply
Spunjji - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkAccording to Intel, it does. Given that one can buy and install a 7970 and one cannot yet buy the Laughabee card, I would say that AMD's "theoretical" performance is a lot more practical for the time being. By the time this thing comes out nVidia and AMD will be rolling out second-gen 28nm parts. Reply
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkHush child. The grownups are talking. Reply
Guspaz - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkHe does have a point, though. We're talking about the difference between the theoretical performance of a shipping product versus the vendor-reported performance of an unshipped product. It's a pretty silly comparison, really. Reply
taltamir - Monday, July 09, 2012 - linkSuch a putdown is not something a grownup does.
Also everything he said is correct. Reply
rickcain2320 - Thursday, July 12, 2012 - linkNot to sound like a kid (or an out of touch grownup) but what is this Phi thing for? Reply
Pirks - Monday, August 13, 2012 - linkThis fetus named DigitalStuck is named so for a reason, 'cause he's still stuck in vagina after so may years. Sometimes he tries to talk but labia majora keeps his hole plugged most of the time, fortunately for all of us. Reply
raghu78 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkSo do you have any benchmarks to show that Intel Xeon Phi achieves 1 TFLOP actual DP performance. Until you have some real benchmarks its best not to comment. Radeon HD 7970 has been reviewed and has proved its compute performance in many benchmarks like LuxMark, SiSoft Sandra . These chips have been praised for their compute performance.
Sisoft Sandra measures DP performance. Reply
Kevin G - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkThe Top 500 results score achieves 118 TFlop with 9800 cores. Making the big assumption that all of the performance was from a 50 core MIC card, that'd put performance per card at 602 Gflop double precision. At 64 cores per card, double precision performance would be 770 Gflop. Chances are that part of the result also used the SandyBridge CPU's, otherwise it would have made more sense to go with the quad core Xeons to make the power consumption figures look better. How much this would skew results would depend on the system configuration. Two Xeon E5-2670's per MIC card would have a bigger increase the performance per card rating than one Xeon E5-2670 for four MIC cards would.
There are a few factors that could raise those scores. As a prototype, clock speeds were likely conservative and there is also the possibility of turbo coming into play. Further more results for a single card and host will likely be higher due to the removal of network overhead.
Regardless, these results paint Xeon Phi as merely competitive instead of having a decisive performance edge over its GPU counter parts. Reply
wumpus - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIf Intel is beating their chest over "theoretical MFLOPS" I would simply assume that is because they can only claim "machoflops" (haven't heard that term in forever) instead of actually pushing the doubles through.
One other issue is that if they are gunning for the top500 list, LuxMark and SiSoft don't matter, they need to use LINPAC. There may internal issues between using numbers that aren't based on LINPAC and aren't as high as the competition (using something else).
Also, pointing out the NVIDIA's GK110-based Tesla K20 is pretty much a joke considering it runs 20% the fp power of the AMD and Intel systems mentioned (for single point DSP work it should be unstoppable, but don't expect it to be useful for much HPC work).
Finally, I wonder what it must be like to work at AMD or Nvidia and watch Intel casually launch a swing-for-the-fences product that challenges your bread and butter. They might have a 15 year history of complete fail (on these high end coprocessors), but it looks like the engineers/groups on the project change and you have to worry each time they try. Reply
Braincruser - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkConsidering the rumors i have heard so far, Tesla K20 will be focused on double point calculation and carrying around 50-80% of the single floating point performance in double. Around 1.5 TFlops. But these are only rumors and as such i would avoid them till we see it in action. Reply
mczak - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkThe chip details about gk110 aren't rumors any more - 15 SMX (with 192SP ALUs and 64DP ALUs) are confirmed. So 1/3 DP rate. The exact flops rate though isn't known since neither clock speed nor the actual active unit count (there's a good chance at least one SMX is always disabled) is known. But it should end up in the neighbourhood of 4 GFlops single / 1.3 GFlops double. Reply
dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link... you mean TFLOPs right? Reply
mczak - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - linkoops yes. 20 years ago it would have been GFlops :-) Reply
Khato - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkTechnically no, because Intel's only numbers are per-node which leaves a question of whether they're allowing the CPUs to contribute or not. If they are including the CPUs, then a single Xeon Phi gets around 700 GFlops in linpack(rmax.)
And yes, I consider a presentation by Intel using the industry standard benchmark to be a 'real benchmark'. Far more real than what the GPU companies typically throw around in their PR materials. Reply
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIntel has already hit 1TFLOPs on LINPACK, though it's not clear whether this is being shown in a live demo or not.,
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-06-18/intel_wi... Reply
mczak - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkDisregarding the issues of "real" vs. "theoretical" flops (which we don't really know enough about, if for instance intel has a 512bit memory interface that could indeed also give an advantage), this is only for DP flops. But I think SP flops shouldn't be completely neglected, and the 7970 (as well as the nvidia K10 though of course this one stinks with DP) very easily beats Knights Corner there.
There's a lot more than raw DP flops though which counts so it may still be quite ok. It doesn't have any of the graphics "baggage" and the "many-core" approach is certainly a bit different. Reply
Haserath - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIf Intel's main selling point is "easier to code for," they probably don't have much of an advantage otherwise. Reply
Assimilator87 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkBut can it Fold? Reply
maximumGPU - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkhow much easier will it be? With all the advancement in gpu programming, and with Microsoft integrating C++ AMP (accelerated massive parallelism) into VS2012, Intel would have trouble selling these if that's their strongest argument. Reply
Jaybus - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIt is algorithm design that is easier, not tool usage or language features.
It depends on the problem. GPGPU is only good at data-parallel algorithms. If you don't have a lot of data that can be broken into many chunks that can each be processed independently, then it won't work well. Developing for GPUs is an ongoing attempt to eliminate branching, because branching can very easily stall the pipeline. In other words, it is often better to pre-calculate all possibilities in parallel, then choose the correct one in the end. It can quickly get complicated trying to remove if / then logic.
MIC, though, uses general purpose CPU cores that don't have the same issues with branching, yet has a 16-wide vector unit. While not nearly as wide as a GPU, it is still sort of the best of both worlds. The flexibility makes it easier to program. And, for some problems that are not so data-parallel, it makes it much easier. Reply
dragonsqrrl - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkHow is Intel kicking Nvidia while they're down? You're speaking as though Xeon Phi is already available, while the latest road maps indicate that Nvidia's Tesla K20 will be launching first. And I'm not sure if you've realized this, but the theoretical fp64 performance of a fully enabled gk110 should be quite a bit higher than 1 TFLOP, assuming reasonable clocks. gk110's DP performance can operate at 1/3 fp32, and gk104 is already capable of pushing 3 TFLOPs fp32 with 1536 cores. So even assuming the gk110 in K20 will be clocked significantly lower (which is pretty much a certainty), Nvidia should have absolutely no problem exceeding 1TFLOP theoretical fp64 performance. Real world performance is another story though. For that we'll just have to wait for benchmarks.
As for the HD7970, I'm not even sure how it's relevant. Pro's in the market for a Tesla or Xeon Phi won't even consider an HD7970 as an option. It has neither the industry nor the driver support to be a viable option in this area. However like Ryan said, given AMD's shift in focus with Southern Islands we may very well see a viable option based on GCN before the year is out. Reply
HighTech4US - Wednesday, October 31, 2012 - linkIntel seems to be kicking their own backside if all they can obtain is 1 TF DP from their 22nm process.
Nvidia's K20 (GK110) is getting 1.3 TF DP on TSMC's 28nm process.
We're basing our numbers off of the figures published by HPCWire.Reply
For a given clockspeed of 732MHz and DP performance of 1.3TFLOPs, it has to be 14 SMXes. The math doesn't work for anything else.
Casper42 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIt really has nothing to do with the common Xeon platform known today.
Granted the Xeon started way back around the Pentium II era and the MIC uses modified Pentium cores, but I find it a little sad that with their marketing budget they couldn't come up with a better name.
Atom, Core, Xeon
Seems like all they needed was a good 4 letter name that vaguely resembles something from a Science Textbook. Reply
A5 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkXeon = Workstation. Makes sense to me? Reply
Casper42 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkExcept that Xeon primarily = Server, not workstation. Reply
Daeros - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIs anyone else wondering why Intel quit with the GPU project? Was it fear of more anti-trust litigation? From the comparisons I have seen, Intel is able to more than compete in the iGPU arena in terms of performance/die area, and I find it hard to believe Intel would experience fabrications woes on the order of what GloFo has gone through. Just wondering... Reply
fluxtatic - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkLegend has a wild GPU driver-writing accident killed Intel's father. To this day, Intel can't bring themselves to write a proper graphics driver. The horror is just too much. Reply
Spunjji - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link+1 :D Reply
diamonddog - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkFinally, someone with a sense of humour! :D Reply
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkThe original Larrabee was based on mature 45nm process. The chip was having own problems. It wasn't performant enough, and there were doubts whether going into the resource intensive yet low margin video card market made sense.
Larrabee did software rendering for everything except the texture unit. Soon after they gave up graphics for Larrabee one thing they touted for Sandy Bridge's iGPU was that some form of fixed function hardware is necessary for good performance. Reply
Kevin G - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIt wasn't raw compute performance that held Larrabee back. That functionality worked form all accounts. What held the designs back was the software stack as a GPU. Intel simply couldn't create a drive that allowed the chip to perform at a competitive level. The chip was reportedly power hungry and used a 6 + 8 pin setup in the few public demos it was seen.
I do think it was wise to cancel Larrabee when they did as it would have also had the impact of forking the x86 ISA further. This time around, the vector extensions are themselves an extension of AVX instead of an incompatible competitor. While an optimized MIC piece of code may not run on Sandy bridge/Ivy bride, the AVX code written with those chip in mind will now work on the MIC card. Reply
A5 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIntel quit making a GPU because it wasn't going to be competitive in the market. Reply
HighTech4US - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkAn Inconvenient Truth: Intel Larrabee story revealed
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2009/10/12/an... Reply
iwod - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIntel's advance with Manufacturing and x86 Is keeping them in near Monopoly state. And it wont be long before Nvidia is kicked out of HPC Market. Reply
duploxxx - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIT won't abandon Quadro or tesla that fast. THey are really settled in for many years, even ATI with there Firepro brand which often provides a better price/performance ratio isn't able to gain much marketshare. Typical behaviour of human they go for a brand name. Reply
Spunjji - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkAs an IT reseller I can confirm that. I recommend AMD FirePro to price-conscious users and almost invariably they prefer to buy lower-grade Quadro cards, even if they don't intend to use it for 3D rendering. The mind boggles. Reply
MrSpadge - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkPart of the reason is software. CUDA is orders of magnitude better utilized than anything AMD offers. Not sure about the Quadros, but nVidias si software support is also strong here. Reply
TC2 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkcorrect!!!
but don't miss that KK is uA targeting only HPC!!! Reply
Kevin G - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkNothing Intel has shown off yet would raise the ire of anti-trust regulators. Just give it a generation or two when PCI-e bandwidth becomes a compute bottleneck and latencies too high. The natural resolution would be to move the MIC chip from a PCI-e card to the motherboard which would connect to Intel Xeon chips over QPI. That is far more restrictive in terms of platform though ti may not enough for regulators to actually step in as it is the natural path for this technology to take. Reply
Jaybus - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkNo. The natural plan is to move the MIC onto the same die with a few modern Xeon cores. At that point, no PICe card could compete, because the bandwidth would be too high. Also, it removes the memory-to-memory copies altogether, since the MIC cores and Xeon cores would have access to the same RAM. All cores would participate in the same shared memory ring bus, which is a 1024-bit (512-bit bidirectional) bus on the current MIC. Reply
HighTech4US - Wednesday, October 31, 2012 - linkNvidia K20 (GK110) 1.3 TFlops DP built on 28nm process available NOW.
Intel Phi built on 22nm process may have 1 TFlops DP and is nowhere to be seen.
http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-10-29/titan_se... Reply
arthur449 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkDid they seriously use "synergistically" in that graphic?
Hold on a moment. I need to go club a few marketing majors. Reply
dgingeri - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkAnyone else see where this is going?
In five years, we'll have an Intel quad to octo core chip with integrated video and about 20 to 40 of these type "assistant" cores on one piece of silicon. I have no doubt.
all the while, AMD already has it with Trinity. Intel will claim it is a first, but it won't really be. AMD just won't be able to fully capitalize on it, leaving them in a secondary market. Reply
Broheim - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linksince when can trinity run native x86 code? Reply
Broheim - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkjust to clarify, I was referring to the the GPU part of trinity. Reply
Meghan54 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkOn page 1, you wrote, "Intel is still holding their cards close to their chest at this time..."
At least get the cliche correct. It should be "...holding their cards close to their vest.....", not chest.
I know it's an old cliche and vest sounds a lot like chest, but if you're going to use a cliche, use the correct one.
Just sayin'..... Reply
slk123 - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkIt can be either chest or vest. Personally I have never heard anyone say vest. Reply
geddarkstorm - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkHolding something "close to the chest" has been the phrase for the past few decades, about keeping details secret or private. Another variant is "playing my cards close to my chest", which of course comes from poker.
I have never heard nor seen "close to the vest" used. No idea where you're getting this. Reply
jecastejon - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - linkI'm very interested in any solution to speed up 3D renderings as many other CG artist, being the obvious ones, an 18 core dual Xeon machine with a top Quadro, a second dedicated Xeon machine or even a small render farm. I don't see Tesla listed in Nvidia's own page with high end 3D rendering software and I don't know why, but I guess it may be because it is a GPU architecture not fully supported for more complex software rendering engines like, say Mental Ray or Maya Software Render.
Could this Xeon-Phi be more transparent to current high end software-rendering? Will I may be able to install one or more of this PCIe cards into the same Xeon machine to speed up specifically a software rendering engine?
To me the advantage of this co-processor is that I will have more freedom to choose a very fast 6 core Xeon for multitask in 3D specific environment, move the co-processors to newer Xeon architectures (I am not sure) and not have to start all over with every new generation. I might end up with a more compact full tower Xeon system. Or maybe with a second dedicated more independent co-processor machine. Sorry if I am asking for to much... Reply
silverblue - Tuesday, June 19, 2012 - link...how much is this going to cost? How much power is it going to use? Are the drivers going to be any good? I know these aren't answers anybody can provide right now, but I don't expect that something sporting 50+ "simple" x86 cores to be cheap or frugal. Still, you never know.
I'm not sure why you mentioned the 7970 though, being that it's a desktop card. The FirePro W9000 is really what we need to compare it to - 6GB GDDR5, 1GHz Tahiti XT card rated at, oddly, 1TFLOPs for double precision. The K20 is rated at an astounding 1.7TFLOPs so Intel and AMD had better have something ready to tackle that one. Reply
drawer77 - Wednesday, June 20, 2012 - linkMany retail processors cost no less than 300 dollars. In my opinion, this card is going to cost more than 10000 dollars. There is definitely a market for low-end version of this card Reply
Wolfpup - Monday, July 23, 2012 - linkAnd if so, how much does it cost? :-D Reply