Intel Xenon Phi in 2013 f/WSJ

[Chris Harlan]

[Rick Lang] “Chris:
“Its about taking stripped down specialty cpus and placing them in very intense clusters of 50 or 100 or more.”

Certainly everything you say is true if you want to build a supercomputer. I just thought there might be a different way to implement the Xeon Phi using one card. Even that might be too expensive for Apple to touch. It does seem odd that 50 cores would only use 8 GB GDDR5 memory in the Knight’s Corner card.

Rick Lang
“

Rick, I misspoke. I didn’t really have a good idea of what was going on here until after Jeremy started sending additional links. Its a fascinating thing that acts as a coprocessor with Sandy Bridge Xeons, and seems to do a lot or most of the floating point work. I truly don’t know whether it would be useful or not when it comes to rendering, but it seems like it would be quite expensive and would require some serious hardware to support/take advantage of it. My guess is that it is far too pricy a package for the next Mac Pro, but I’d sure be curious if you can build something out of it to render and design with. Sorry that I jumped to conclusions about your post, and thanks for posting it because I’ve enjoyed reading about it throughout the day.

[Rick Lang]

Chris:
“I’d sure be curious if you can build something out of it to render and design with.”

Rendering is one of the areas which could benefit from the co-processor approach and, as you’re thinking, it’s utility will depend upon its affordability. It’s sounding like Intel is taking off the gloves to counter the rapid rise of NVIDIA and the CUDA engine in their GPUs. Intel may be on a road where they are just starting out and may need to discount the product to get a foothold in this market although pricing new products inexpensively isn’t something Intel is known for.

That’s where Apple might help since Apple will try to get a bargain where they can or ignore the product. And then there’s the Windows based competitors that may also play into the scenario at some point. I think 2013 will be interesting. Perhaps the ‘next generation’ thinking will bear fruit for many disciplines including those related to video post processing. Like Bob Mansfied says when talking about the MacBook Pro Retina (and I paraphrase): when you think incrementally you are limited in what you can do; when you start over to build something new, you can achieve more. Tim Cook’s comments about what’s coming for high-end computers next year smells like ‘next generation’ thinking that takes time to implement right. Not taking anything away from the usefulness today of the HP Z820 for example, there may be more good things coming from a direction we weren’t even thinking about.

An example of that can be found perhaps in the BlackMagic Cinema Camera using a sensor designed for scientists for mainstream entry-level professional creative videographers shooting raw (or in-camera ProRes422HQ and DNxHD) in an unusually affordable camera and quality post workflow.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Chris Harlan]

[Rick Lang] “Tim Cook’s comments about what’s coming for high-end computers next year smells like ‘next generation’ thinking that takes time to implement right. Not taking anything away from the usefulness today of the HP Z820 for example, there may be more good things coming from a direction we weren’t even thinking about. “

Rick, I fear we’re just going to have to disagree on a whole bunch of topics from what Tim Cook’s comments “smell like” to what you can do with a Xeon Phi. To me, Tim Cook’s comments “smell” like a vague after-thought of placation. Even calling them “comments” is giving that little grunt of communication far too much credence. And, trying to bend the use of something like Xeon Phi to fit into the service of a Mac, at least from everything I’ve read about it, is wishful thinking. Customers for the Xeon Phi are companies like Cray and HPC. Unless Apple is planning a huge and momentous turn in direction, I don’t see how the Xeon Phi could be part of their 2013/14offerings. I fear that waiting to see if this is so is the province of acolytes. From my POV, it requires a great deal of belief to blend the Xeon Phi and Tim Cook’s grunt into the same milkshake.