[petsc-dev] http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-11-12/intel_brings_manycore_x86_to_market_with_knights_corner.html

[Karl Rupp]

On 11/12/2012 06:08 PM, Barry Smith wrote:
>
>>
>> In terms of raw numbers, $2,649 for 320 GB/sec and 8 GB of memory is quite a lot compared to the $500 of a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition at 288 GB/sec and 3 GB memory. My hope is that Xeon Phi can do better than GPUs in kernels requiring frequent global synchronizations, e.g. ILU-substitutions.
>
>     But, but, but it runs the Intel instruction set, that is clearly worth 5+ times the price :-)

I'm tempted to say 'yes', but at a second thought I'm not so sure 
whether any of us is actually programming in x86 assembly (again)?
Part of the GPU/accelerator hype is arguably due to a rediscovery of 
programming close to hardware, even though it was/is non-x86. With Xeon 
Phi we might now observe some sort of compiler war instead of low-level 
kernel tuning - is this what we want?

Best regards,
Karli