Replies to post #120304 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[mas]

Intel Xeon Phi is a recently released high-performance coprocessor which features 61 cores each supporting 4 hardware threads with 512-bit wide SIMD registers achieving a peak theoretical performance of 1Tflop/s in double precision. Many scientific applications involve operations on large sparse matrices such as linear solvers, eigensolver, and graph mining algorithms. The core of most of these applications involves the multiplication of a large, sparse matrix with a dense vector (SpMV). In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Xeon Phi coprocessor for SpMV. We first provide a comprehensive introduction to this new architecture and analyze its peak performance with a number of micro benchmarks. Although the design of a Xeon Phi core is not much different than those of the cores in modern processors, its large number of cores and hyperthreading capability allow many application to saturate the available memory bandwidth, which is not the case for many cutting-edge processors. Yet, our performance studies show that it is the memory latency not the bandwidth which creates a bottleneck for SpMV on this architecture. Finally, our experiments show that Xeon Phi's sparse kernel performance is very promising and even better than that of cutting-edge general purpose processors and GPUs.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.1078
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.1078v1

[wbmw]

Also found this on performance vs Nvidia:

Actually, one thing the data seems to suggest is that nVidia's K20 won't even provide a better solution than dual Xeon E5-2670 by themselves. nVidia essentially has a DE-celerator card.

At least there are a hand full of cases where someone would want a Xeon Phi....