Intel Xeon PHI coprocessors for rendering?

[Rick Eloy]

Hi, all!
A potencial customer came to me with this question and I wasn't really sure how to answer it... Can Intel Xeon PHI coprocessors be used for rendering with V-Ray?
From what I've read, they'd need special coding in order to use them, is that correct?

[AndresAhumada]

Some time ago up a conversation was generated in the forum.
It is that Vlado did something, testing or theories. I also know must be written all over again.

Another fact is that Xeon Phi is based on the same core Pentium III processor and is X86

[Morbid Angel]

The issue with phi is that their fastest card has 61 cores and they run pretty slow, only at 1.25 ghz or so. So that's 91.5 ghz with 16 gb of ram. I suppose you can stack 4 cards like that in your system though make it more efficient, but they aren't cheap either. At $4235.00 per card that's quite the price (similar to xeon e5 2699 actually)

These days if you get dual xeon e5 2699 v3 which has 36 cores in total running at 3.6 ghz thats 129.6 ghz and your main board will allow as much ram as you need.

Indeed phi is not plug and play with vray, so additional work might be required (I've seen devs post about that a while back) but since this work might outweigh the gain I really can't see any future in it (strictly imho of course).

The real future now is the gpu, with thousands of cores and soon lots of ram, that is the way to go...Almost there anyway.

[Rick Eloy]

Thanks, guys! That definetly closes the discussion (in a good way, of course).