By: Exophase (exophase.delete@this.gmail.com), January 10, 2015 6:49 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
juanrga (nospam.delete@this.juanrga.com) on January 10, 2015 6:32 pm wrote:
> Any GPU that I know fits the manycore definition.
There is no hard manycore definition so you can pretty much say what you want. But it's not useful to consider GPUs or Xeon Phi as the same class of devices as something like Parallela that scales to hundreds (or thousands) of fully independent, more or less clasical small scalar in-order cores. Cores with very wide vector processors and many in-flight threads are better at a different set of problems than big sets of small independent cores are.
But the worst thing is when people call vector lanes individual cores.
Yes, GPUs and Xeon Phi do still tend to have a few times or even an order of magnitude more cores than the heavily throughput optimized alternatives like Haswell or Power8. That's true even normalizing for the die area difference between the highest end desktop GPUs and highest end desktop CPUs. But that doesn't they were optimizing core count. More likely the core size just ended up as it did as a natural result of scaling a useful DLP optimized to a comfortable point before starting to get too diminished returns.
> Any GPU that I know fits the manycore definition.
There is no hard manycore definition so you can pretty much say what you want. But it's not useful to consider GPUs or Xeon Phi as the same class of devices as something like Parallela that scales to hundreds (or thousands) of fully independent, more or less clasical small scalar in-order cores. Cores with very wide vector processors and many in-flight threads are better at a different set of problems than big sets of small independent cores are.
But the worst thing is when people call vector lanes individual cores.
Yes, GPUs and Xeon Phi do still tend to have a few times or even an order of magnitude more cores than the heavily throughput optimized alternatives like Haswell or Power8. That's true even normalizing for the die area difference between the highest end desktop GPUs and highest end desktop CPUs. But that doesn't they were optimizing core count. More likely the core size just ended up as it did as a natural result of scaling a useful DLP optimized to a comfortable point before starting to get too diminished returns.
