Intel’s 50+ core MIC architecture: HPC on a Card or Massive Co-Processor?

April 10, 2012 by
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Rob Farber has just posted an interesting exploration of the Intel MIC architecture in Dr. Dobbs Journal.

While still at an early pre-hardware release stage, it is possible to draw some preliminary conclusions based on an analysis of the MIC and GPU architectures and the currently available information about the NVIDIA Kepler and Intel Knights Corner chips. In this article, I consider these two processors based on established high-level comparative measures such as memory capacity, balance ratios, and Amdahl’s Law in the context of four programming paradigms:

  • MPI (Message Passing Interface)
  • Directive-based programming like OpenMP and OpenACC
  • Common libraries providing FFT and BLAS functionality
  • Language platforms based on a strong-scaling execution model (CUDA and OpenCL™)

Read the Full Story. In related news, Farber is currently presenting a series of OpenCL webinars sponsored by AMD.

 

Filed Under: CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, HPC Hardware, News