Intel's Xeon Phi is not really competitive against GPUs or ever CPUs IMO (gives typical speedup of maybe 3x against a mainstream Ivy Bridge system and costs $2500 while consuming 300 watts).
Nvidia's Tesla cards are also very expensive for the performance they provide and the gamer cards have their double precision performance artifically reduced to 1/6 of the professional ones. Also, the GTX 600 "Kepler" cards ofter are slower in compute benchmarks compared to the previous generation! Similarly, they lose out big time against Radeon cards in OpenCL benchmarks ( look for LuxMark scores at bottom of the page) probably because of bad drivers.
Neither AMD nor Nvidia (and I think the same applies to Xeon Phi) have any support for compute using open-source drivers and the proprietary ones are architecture-limited, buggy and unoptimized with no option to change that.
This is where the Parallella shines (and being able to carry the power of a standard desktop PC in your pocket in a device that consumes only a few watts and can run fanless is of course amazing). And not being dependent on the PC platform with its slow and proprietary BIOS, Microsoft-controlled Secure Boot etc. also is a good thing.
So I really hope the Parallella platform will be a big success and I will definately buy the 64-core version when it becomes available.
One more question: How fast can the Epiphany chip switch from one task to another (one probably has to download on-chip memory content, registers etc. and upload new code and data)? This could be important in a really parallel-optimized system where for instance a graphics software and a web browser's rendering engine want to access the coprocessor at the same time.Statistics: Posted by toterpinguin — Mon Apr 01, 2013 1:52 pm
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