28 karma · joined November 25, 2019
This usually provides acceptable results for applications like correcting lens distortion, even across multiple instances of the same lens. However, sometimes better accuracy is needed - either because the lens is very cheap and inconsistent between different examples or for applications like SLAM where better camera calibration translates directly into better results. In that case there are techniques like online calibration to tweak the calibration parameters on the fly.
Plus, this has largely been tried before with Xeon Phi and it didn't end so well.
Huge vector units like AVX-512 are mainly useful for workloads that need huge amounts of RAM that you just can't get with a GPU, or for workloads that are very latency sensitive and incompatible with GPU task scheduling because they are in some other CPU-bound code.
Frankly, in order to stand out among MIT applicants by demonstrating some sort of mathematical ability on these exams, the minimum is probably USAMO qualification (top 270 of ~200k AMC takers). Otherwise it's a nice thing to have but not particularly unique. Even then I know a reasonable number of USAMO qualifiers who have been rejected.
Source: was a MIT undergrad < 5 years ago
If you only have 2D motion and can spend more money or mess around with unsupported hardware (salvaged Neato vacuum) a laser rangefinder is also a decent option.
Cinebench R15: 206 single, 7302 multi, 35.4x scaling
POV-Ray: 9:02 single, 0:19 multi, 28.5x scaling
The scaling can be greater than the number of physical cores due to SMT. On the other hand, turbo clocks increases the single-core speed by 10% or more on most CPUs.