On 2014-06-23 07:07, Henry Baker wrote:
FYI -- Lots of potential math applications...
https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/datastack/blog/2014/06...
I'm curious whether you (or anyone here) thinks this is really so different than programmable micro-code -- e.g. writable control store? [I know that Lisp Machines (well, Symbolics' machines until the XL- series) had this capability, and so did some vaxen (-WCS versions). I've heard that early IBM 360's or 370's had this, too, but I have no direct experience with modifying the microcode on those]. So I wonder how revolutionary will this Intel move really be? My impression (no hard data, though) is that users are often really excited by the idea, but very, very, few actually use this capability in practice.
Disrupting the Data Center to Create the Digital Services Economy Posted by Diane Bryant in The Data Stack on Jun 18, 2014 12:56:03 PM
.... But what we find even more exciting is our next innovation in processor design that can dramatically increase application performance through fully custom accelerators. **** We are integrating our industry leading Xeon processor with a coherent FPGA in a single package, socket compatible to our standard Xeon E5 processor offerings.****
Why are we excited by this announcement? The FPGA provides our customers a programmable, high performance coherent acceleration capability to turbo-charge their critical algorithms. And with down-the-wire reprogramability, the algorithms can be changed as new workloads emerge and compute demands fluctuate. Based on industry benchmarks FPGA-based accelerators can deliver >10X performance gains. By integrating the FPGA with the Xeon processor, we estimate that customers will see an additional 2X in performance thanks to the low latency, coherent interface.
Our new Xeon+FPGA solution provides yet another customized option, one more tool for customers to use to improve their critical data center metric of “Performance/TCO”. It highlights our commitment to delivering the very best solutions across all data center workloads and our passion to lead in the transformation of the industry to cloud services. ....
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