Hacker News Reader

Comment by antoineMoPa | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes wonder if it would be possible for CPUs to have, in addition to their full speed cores, a small part dedicated to parallel tasks with drastically lower speed, but a very high number of cores. Like a tiny graphics card, but with an x86 architecture and less driver problems.

View on HN

Integrated gpus are almost exactly that, minus the x86 part. A very high number of x86 cores would take a ton of chips space and generate a lot of heat.

The Larabee were to have 48 Pentium cores, each with their own L2 cache.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)

FPGA pcie card sounds like what you want, I'm not sure if it would have less driver problems though.

https://hackaday.com/2018/02/17/catching-the-pcie-bus/

So... Xeon Phi?

Something like that, but with more cores and cheaper.

It looks like there are up to 64 cores in Xeon Phi at 1.5Ghz (price > $1000). A Nvidia 1030 is still better with more than 300 cuda cores at 1.4GHz (price ~= $150). Not that I think that cuda cores and Xeon Phi cores can be compared, but 64 is not that much at that price... What we'd need is dumber cores in very high number. We don't need all fancy things that normal CPU cores have, like virtualization.

Note that Nvidia's core counts are misleading. To apply Nvidia's logic to Xeon Phi, a 64-core Xeon Phi is really 512 cuda cores--each SIMD lane is counted as an independent "Cuda core".

I wish we could talk about GPUs and similar architectures in terms of their total FPU width—how many 32b or 64b floating point operations can be done per clock— and as a secondary measure the number of independent instruction streams that can be worked on in parallel. One provides a upper bound on the arithmetic power of the chip and the other predicts how easy it will be to get close to full utilization of those compute resources. Distilling an architecture down to just one core count only guarantees that you can't compare it against dissimilar architectures.

1024 (64 x 16-wide float32).

Good point, I did not know what SIMD was. (Very interesting side projects to come...)

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/hands-on-with-a-144-co...

The Larrabee architecture was something like this, no?

Or Intel could just unify AVX-512 and Gen machine code.

I don't think it's likely, but I wouldn't be overly surprised if they end up doing something like that.

I've wondered the reverse, why GPU manufacturers don't replace the whole current motherboard, CPU and memory setup and create their own all in 1 PC that runs on the graphics card.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com