Currently in many applications, such as petroleum and natural gas exploration, seismic and financial services industries, have used GPU or special computation accelerators for data processing, such as AMD FireStream and NVIDIA Tesla. As the world’s number one processor manufacturer, although Intel The company encountered setbacks in the development of its own graphics chip product, Larrabee, but the company still developed a chip product code-named Knights Corner. This product will incorporate a multi-core architecture and X86, due to the current operating system needs to be run. Get the support of X86 processors, so David Kirk thinks these products will not disappear.
"The biggest problems we discovered were, of course, not all, continuous control tasks and parallel data and computing tasks. That's why we believe that heterogeneous parallel computing [parallel and continuous] is a must. CPUs are commodity technologies, and we There are multiple CPU vendors working together. In fact, from my point of view, Intel has no particular advantage in developing hybrid systems, and they have only had a little success in the design of parallel machines or programming environments."
The Knights Corner chip on Intel's HPC platform will consist of a standalone CPU and a multi-core HPC accelerator based on a PCI Express slot. Many HPC experts believe that the PCI Express bus will become a bottleneck for such accelerators, so the bandwidth of the PCI Express bus is too low. The solution to this problem is to introduce a chip product that integrates an X86 core and a large number of parallel graphics cores. In this regard, AMD's solution is Fusion. However, David Kirk believes that PCI Express will not necessarily become a bottleneck.
David Kirk: "Contrary to that, PCIe's bandwidth does not often become a bottleneck in most applications. PCIe's bandwidth is higher than any other bus in the current system, including disk, network and other systems, system memory bus or front-side bus This means that we can also make a lot of technological improvements."
Like other HPC experts, NVIDIA is not optimistic about the future of Cell processors. At present, Mr. David Kirk is working on CUDA and GPU computing education and research. He claims that Cell does have a very important role in some current markets, but it is not enough to threaten GPUs.
NVIDIA: Intel's Heterogeneous Multicore Technology Has No Advantage
David Kirk, chief scientist at NVIDIA, said that heterogeneous computing architecture is indeed the most effective solution to deal with all types of data, but he does not think Intel's Knights Corner Accelerator can create a feasible heterogeneous multi-core platform. This is Intel's product specifically for HPC applications.