A(n all too) Little Known Documentary on Xeon Phi
Let’s take a moment away from the drama of high school – to foreshadow an article on the thermodynamic challenges facing current and future computer architects – a fascinating documentary on the development of Intel’s massively parallel coprocessor, the Xeon Phi.
Via: [SemiAccurate]
“To create some reasonable replica of the real world….. you quickly come to understand: it’s a massive computational problem – and inherently a parallel problem“
“A microprocessor can’t get faster and faster without… literally melting”
“I remember being in a meeting with Bill Gates, at Microsoft, and [I] showed the processor roadmap – and he said ‘Oh! You’re really serious about this multicore stuff!!’” 🙂
“Yonah made a very simple observation, that if it reduced the speed of each core by roughly ten percent, it could cut power consumption in each of those cores by roughly fifty percent“
“Larrabee for me, as a terascale project, was the most beautiful thing. Not just ambitious, but aesthetically beautiful. Difficult to do, but also incredibly promising”
Mind to blown to include a blockquote
“They did things we talked about doing, but never had the time or resources, and this is just it – when you open up to the outside community you get a force multiplier [that] we could never replicate inside the company.”
Alexander Riccio 