xeon with on-die fpga accelerator. nice for vray methinks?

[super gnu]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03...tel_xeon_fpga/

[Donfarese]

Was waiting for them to do something with FPGA, wonder how much this will help rendering?

[vlado]

I've no idea; we did play with an FPGA board a while back and it was totally not worth it. Most of the performance issues in our code are not due to the processor being slow, but due to memory being slow - a lot of the time the processor simply waits for data to arrive from the system memory. That problem won't be solved by an FPGA. It's also part of the reason why GPUs work so well for rendering - they have ways to hide memory latency and do other stuff while waiting for data to arrive. Memory speeds have not really changed for many years...

Best regards,
Vlado

[Alex_M]

That's a nice piece of info. I never knew that. Does that mean that memory with more Mhz and less latency is better than investing in a faster CPU at the moment? How much (approx.) does memory play part in rendering performance in regards to CPU? And does it play a crucial part in performance in every scene or just in some specific setups/situations? I never knew that memory was so important. I've always read that memory speed plays almost no role in the rendering process and that only the capacity is what matters. Was this a misconception that got spread around? Or is that old versions of Vray didn't get advantage of the old memory architectures of that time? What about DDR3 vs DDR4 technology? Does Vray get boost from the new DDR4 standard and how much compared to DDR3?

[Donfarese]

Wow, that is very interesting. Would like to know the answers to that, never knew memory speed was an issue.