[HN Gopher] Knight's Landing: Atom with AVX-512 - Chips and Cheese
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       Knight's Landing: Atom with AVX-512 - Chips and Cheese
        
       Author : rbanffy
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2022-12-09 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
        
       | convolvatron wrote:
       | didn't this whole processor line get cancelled?
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | Some comments on the submission from 16 hours back:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33916480
        
         | rbanffy wrote:
         | Can they get merged?
        
       | mk_stjames wrote:
       | The Xeon Phi coprocessor pci-e cards with similar CPU can be had
       | on ebay for like $60 these days. Sadly I haven't seen any good
       | writeups on setting up an environment to run such cards in a
       | homebuilt system. I think it would be neat to build a little
       | mini-supercomputer with 8 of them stacked in one of those mining
       | motherboards with 8 pci-e slots. But I'd have no idea where to
       | start with the toolchain needed to compile an run code across
       | them.
        
         | thechao wrote:
         | The original cards couldn't be thermally throttle, safely.
         | Whenever the union guys came to our floor they were required to
         | wear PPE (helmet, goggles, earplugs, earmuffs, and a vest). It
         | was as loud as a high powered low quality vacuum cleaner.
         | Staying within 5' of the towers, when running, without ear
         | protection was an OSHA violation.
        
         | cpgxiii wrote:
         | The only Xeon Phi products to be available in PCIe form are the
         | first-gen KNC cards. These are not Atom-based, they do not
         | share the x86_64 ABI, and the only effective toolchain for them
         | is older versions of the proprietary Intel compiler.
         | 
         | While they were quirky at the time (and I got some neat
         | simulations out of them), they were a massive pain in the ass
         | in every other way:
         | 
         | - Requires a motherboard that supports large PCIe BAR
         | addressing, much more common now, not at release time (and good
         | luck getting this working with multiple Xeon Phi coprocessors
         | on a non-server motherboard) - You likely need enough host
         | memory to cover each of the cards (so 8GB * number of cards) -
         | You'll need to patch the Intel MPSS kernel driver to work with
         | newer kernels - You'll need to patch the Intel MPSS tools to
         | work on anything that isn't ~2015 RHEL - You'll want to buy the
         | water cooling kit that alphacool made for them, it's the only
         | way to keep temperatures and noise to a reasonable level
         | 
         | Solve all of those, and you get a (fairly cheap) coprocessor
         | reasonably good at parallel yet branchy tasks. It's much easier
         | to use the second generation of KNL (or third-generation KNM)
         | which share the standard X86_64 ABI and can boot a modern Linux
         | distro and you can use a normal toolchain).
        
         | Y_Y wrote:
         | I remember playing with them at the local supercomputer
         | facility. I thought it was so funny that you were expected to
         | ssh into a pcie device.
        
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       (page generated 2022-12-09 23:01 UTC)