Intel® Xeon Phi™ for vray

[prorender]

Hi,

as Intel introduce the Intel® Xeon Phi™ onto the market, I ask myself if this could be a new alternative to Cuda architecture. Can you please explain more to that new topic? How about programming and port your vray code to that coprocessor?

As we have now developments in GPU/Cuda will there be a coexisting new support for XEON Phi? Would it be simpler to code with it or do you see here advantages in developing? If yes, what is your estimation for a release date for vray supporting Intel Xeon Phi?

At the moment to me it seems having many possibilities in development and improvments of HPC/Rendering applications. But which will prevail? And where the consumer have to invest his money best? Difficult to answer, but we are living in fast developping time.

Time will show, and I look forward to stay well-briefed in this topic.

Regards.
Daniel Krüger

www.prorender.de

[vlado]

There was a already a thread discussing this; don't want to repeat all of it.

In short: we are looking at the Xeon Phi; we'll let you know as soon as we know more.

However in general, we are pretty much in same boat as you: we have OpenCL by AMD, CUDA by nVidia, Xeon Phi by Intel. Which one to support? Supporting a new hardware architecture can be months and months (if not years) of development work. Will it pay off, or will it be money thrown down the drain in the long run? We don't know

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

we have OpenCL by AMD, CUDA by nVidia, Xeon Phi by Intel. Which one to support?
Best regards,
Vlado

OK so for now it seems you are putting all energy into CUDA by nVidia since OpenCL is not working and Phi is too new?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...light=xeon+phi

[vlado]

OK so for now it seems you are putting all energy into CUDA by nVidia since OpenCL is not working and Phi is too new?

Not at all. We are looking into Xeon Phi; we are working with AMD to get OpenCL working on their cards (and there is some nice progress in that regard). So we are keeping all the options open for now

Best regards,
Vlado

[prorender]

In the meanwhile here are interesting informations about Intel Xeon Phi, how it works and what future developers should basically know about.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...It2oXasi9eOSUh

Regards
Daniel Krüger

www.prorender.de

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Side question Vlado, did u get ur hands on one of those cards?

[vlado]

Side question Vlado, did u get ur hands on one of those cards?

We should have one by next week, hopefully.

Best regards,
Vlado

[duke2]

It could be compared to PhysX, which got its own hardware acceleration (with a low adoption rate and hesitance from developers), until Nvidia decided they'd integrate the acceleration into it's GPU's.

You'd hope Intel would adhere to an existing API like OpenCL. We'll see.

[bigbossfr]

We should have one by next week, hopefully.

Best regards,
Vlado

It is a good news. I wait for some updates, i know some studios are interested by this.

[prorender]

Hi,

some time passed since the Intel Xeon Phi cards were released. Are there some news in the development of vray for this coprocessor?

Regards
Daniel Krüger

[sandykoufax]

BTW, anybody who are actually using this card for any purpose?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Universities, researches, banks etc will use these cards.