Xeon Phi /x200 /Knights Landing - Trash or Treasure ?

[Allan74]

First off, forgive me for being uninformed, BUT....

With a now constant stream of LGA3647 Xeon Phi Knights Landing chips, specifically the 7250 showing up in the used marketplace for sub-$100, has anyone been brave enough to sacrifice a run-of-the-mill LGA3647 OEM/Retail board for testing ?

 

[fp64]

The main problem with these cards is the hidden cost. Although potentially very useful for scientific computations (avx 512 and lots of cores), it is necessary to buy the intel compiler suite. forget it. in contrast, amd gpus are a superb solution right now.

 

[NathanM3]

The main problem with these cards is the hidden cost. Although potentially very useful for scientific computations (avx 512 and lots of cores), it is necessary to buy the intel compiler suite. forget it. in contrast, amd gpus are a superb solution right now.

Knights Landing is a socketed CPU, not a PCIe card like previous versions of Phi. I don't think it need the Intel Compiler Suite either.

 

[Allan74]

LGA3647, 68 Core, 272 threads, 215W, 6chan Mem, 14nm

Techpowerup

Intel Website Specs

Xeon Phi 7250 LGA3647 - Ebay

 

[Allan74]

To add to my original post, I was considering something like the CPU in question for a virtualize-everything home server...of sorts.
I am simply wondering if anyone has tried one in an LGA3647 motherboard.

 

[111alan]

As long as you can find a board it's worthy, if you use AVX-512 it's even better than EPYC2-7702 in int/FP performance. And yes it can boot windows and linux directly and compatible with almost any software on them.

That is, if you can find a motherboard. It's not compatible with normal Skylake-SP boards.

 

[alex_stief]

for a virtualize-everything home server

Using these for anything else than number-crunching, with code optimized specifically for this architecture, is a terrible idea.
Just get a regular used Xeon at a similar price point, and skip the disappointment.

 

[bayleyw]

Even for number-crunching they are pretty disappointing, as far as I know outside of dense matrix operations in programs that link against MKL, there are no off-the-shelf packages with Phi accelerator support. The Phi will boot Linux, but existing, non-optimized binaries perform terribly on it.

 

[fp64]

https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/5q5hel

 

[Nabladel]

Its pretty hard to find compatible motherboards for these (socket versions). From my experience even simple tasks such as updating packages in linux is slow...

 

[edge]

Linux is dropping MIC support from the kernel. PHI is deader than a budgy nailed to its perch.