[Bf-cycles] Info Cycles and Xeon Phi

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

It's not going to work automatically, the Xeon Phi is very different
from other Xeon processors. It can basically be treated similar to a
GPU through OpenCL (may be easy to test if someone has the hardware),
or as if it was a linux server on a local network (requires
recompiling Blender + all its dependencies).

It would be interesting to test it once, but I haven't seen impressive
real world raytracing benchmarks yet, and it's quite expensive (2700$
?). Intel showed it to be 1.8x faster at raytracing than 16 Xeon
cores, but that was a very specific controlled environment, in
practice that number will be lower for real renders. At that price you
can get the very fastest CPU and probably get very close performance
while benefiting from the speed with other areas of Blender and other
applications.

I'm not really convinced it's worth it for me to spend much time on
this, with GPU rendering it's interesting because many users already
have a powerful GPU and they are relatively cheap. But I don't see a
big audience for a 2700$ coprocessor that's only a bit faster than a
CPU that you can get at a lower price?

Brecht.

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:18 PM, vincenzoaddeo at virgilio.it
<vincenzoaddeo at virgilio.it> wrote:
> Hi guys, I am an Italian filmaker and Blender user. I am guessing if this
> new xeon-phi coprocessor could be used by Cycles, alone or alongside with
> other xeon processors ( maybe without compiling issues). I understand that
> Cycles is more cpu-oriented than gpu, and these xeon-phi toys would speed up
> cpu rendering and would be great for animations.
>
> Let me know please if you know something about it
>
> Hi
>
> Vincenzo
>
> P.S. Sorry if my question was already asked by other hundread blenderists.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-cycles mailing list
> Bf-cycles at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-cycles
>