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Comment by jakebasile | Hacker News Reader

The GPU looks like a monster, and I am sure it'll deliver more power to AI applications, but what I really want to know is when I can put one in my gaming PC.

I think it's great that what started as a specialist gaming device is now being used in industry for Big Things. The development cost that Nvidia et al. have invested in new designs has undoubtedly been financed in (large) part by the gaming community. Now income and advancements for both sectors feed into the other and gamers like me are reaping the benefits with reduced price:performance across the range.

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Meanwhile I still remember being seated at the Games Development Conference talk in 2009 where Intel tried to convince us how Larrabee would change the world of computing.

Still waiting for them to produce anything worthwhile buying instead of AMD and NVidia GPUs.

Actually, it's now called Xeon Phi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi

I know, they are pretty hard to get and as such largely ignored by HPC and gamming communities.

Their main sales pitch is "given that it's a bunch of x86 put together, you don't have to port your code to get Massive Paralellization by Intel (TM)". Some supercomputers use them, but it's true: I've never seen a worthwhile comparisson between that and a strong (or equivalent) GPGPU.

There are some very interesting talks by Intels experts on how to use these guys with AVX and AVX512 (or however its called now) and the multiplicative improvement both multicore and AVX give when used together (the sales line goes along like this "10x for multicore, and on top of that 4x for AVX, voilá 40x speedup!").

I don't work in an HPC environment, so I don't really know if they stand up in reality to Intels claims.

Hard to get? For better or worse TTBOMK there are more Intel Xeon Phi machines on the TOP500 than GPU accelerated systems.

Yes for people with normal bank accounts vs random computer store.

These efforts are mostly going to aid further market segmentation and boosting profits; e.g. even for development you'll now need a Tesla/Quadro that costs a ton of money, the days of GTX cards that have the same GK2xx or GM2xx chip as Teslas is over.

While the "tensor" units may land in consumer stuff (though I don't think it'll happen this year) I expect there to be little "trickle-down" planned or wanted at this stage.

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