Intel Visual Compute Accelerators

[voxadam]

Is anyone familiar with Intel's VCA boards? There's frustratingly little information about them on Intel's site.

I ran across this board which doesn't quite look like the PR photos that I've seen on Intel's site, maybe it's an engineering sample. The little information that I've been able to find leads me to believe that the boards contain multiple (three, judging by the six memory slots) Xeon CPUs, slots for local RAM, are connected to a host using a PCIe X16 interface, and that they're used in high end video broadcasting.

EDIT: The more I look at it the more I think the board in question is actually a VCA2 meaning it has three E3-1585L v5 processors. I can't find any mention of how much these things go for so I'm guessing it's *way* out of my price range. Still, it looks like these cards would be great for mining XMR.

 

[StammesOpfer]

Looks like it could be a very interesting product but how do programs utilize it? How is it presented to the OS?

 

[Patrick]

VCA(2) were popular with a few broadcasters. Personally, I would sell it and get an EPYC or E5 for mining.

 

[voxadam]

I take your use of the phrase “were popular” that this is one of those sectors that Intel dipped their toes in but never gained much traction.

Avnet lists VCA2 cards for the low low price of $3,065.40. That's classic Intel expensive for a coprocessor with three E3-1585L v5 quad core CPUs, especially since you still have to pony up for the DDR4 ECC SODIMMs.