The intrepid Greg Pfister takes a detailed look at Intel’s MIC architecture on his Perils of Parallel Blog this week.
Returning to the main discussion, Intel’s MIC has the great advantage that you immediately get a simply ported, working program; and, in the cases that don’t require SIMD operations to hum, that may be all you need. Intel is pushing this notion hard. One IDF session presentation was titled “Program the SAME Here and Over There” (caps were in the title). This is a very big win, and can be sold easily because customers want to believe that they need do little. Furthermore, you will probably always need less SIMD / vector width with MIC than with GPGPU-style accelerators. Only experience over time will tell whether that really matters in a practical sense, but I suspect it does.
Pfister has an extensive background in HPC, and this article features some insightful comments on how important software compatibility is to the future of MIC and the industry at large. Read the Full Story.
