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

[Paul Mullowney]

Every test we've done shows that the MKL triangular solve doesn't scale 
at all on a sandy bridge multi-core. I doubt it will be any different on 
the Xeon Phi.

-Paul
>>
>>>
>>> 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
>