[Bf-cycles] Info Cycles and Xeon Phi

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Nvidia seeded Tesla cards to developers, so for the Phi that could be a good way to start as well. Especially it would run with opencl "out of the box" (after a recompile).

Having one reference system that does OpenCL Cycles good would be a great step forward. This however is not in our control really. The stakeholders here are Intel and AMD first :)

-Ton-

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
Blender Institute   Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam   The Netherlands

On 8 Apr, 2013, at 16:02, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:

> 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
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-cycles mailing list
> Bf-cycles at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-cycles