Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#2We badly need an alternative to Nvidia/CUDA for deep learning... but realistically, if Intel wants to make headway in the deep learning market, it must offer hardware that can not only compete on performance with Nvidia, but also work out-of-the-box (that is, without requiring lots of one-off tinkering and tweaking) with popular deep/machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch, and Theano.
There is a lot of software infrastructure being built atop these frameworks, and switching costs are getting higher by the day. No one wants to use some kind of 'non-standard' fork of [name your DL framework of choice] customized for Intel hardware, because such a fork can quickly get stale in comparison to the upstream project.
Intel needs to be both better/faster and drop-in compatible with the popular frameworks.
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#3This earlier thread on HN might be of interest:
Why didn't Larrabee fail? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12293308
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#4Nice, but how is this going to fit with Nervana?
Also more than hardware how do Intel's libraries compare with CuDNN?
At the end of the day ease of use and software support matter along with the hardware.
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#5This earlier thread on HN might be of interest: Why didn't Larrabee fail? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12293308
Not a very good one, I feel it covers up too much of Larabee's past. I think it was well established that it would be a GPU, but suffered from Intel getting confused about what it should be.
If anyone would like to know more about Intel, I think this AMA is much better
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15iaet/iama_cpu_archi...
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#6We badly need an alternative to Nvidia/CUDA for deep learning... but realistically, if Intel wants to make headway in the deep learning market, it must offer hardware that can not only compete on performance with Nvidia, but also work out-of-the-box (that is, without requiring lots of one-off tinkering and tweaking) with popular deep/machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch, and Theano. There is a lo…
But being drop-in compatible means supporting CUDA or the CPU interface.
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#7We badly need an alternative to Nvidia/CUDA for deep learning... but realistically, if Intel wants to make headway in the deep learning market, it must offer hardware that can not only compete on performance with Nvidia, but also work out-of-the-box (that is, without requiring lots of one-off tinkering and tweaking) with popular deep/machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch, and Theano. There is a lo…
But being drop-in compatible means supporting CUDA or the CPU interface.
They could also contribute code to the most popular frameworks, instead of releasing forks like "Intel Caffe."[1]
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#8We badly need an alternative to Nvidia/CUDA for deep learning... but realistically, if Intel wants to make headway in the deep learning market, it must offer hardware that can not only compete on performance with Nvidia, but also work out-of-the-box (that is, without requiring lots of one-off tinkering and tweaking) with popular deep/machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch, and Theano. There is a lo…
I agree, AMD is working on making it easy to port CUDA[1], which still doesn't provide a strict alternative, but it's something
http://wccftech.com/amd-cuda-compilercompatibility-layer-ann...
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#9I wish they had a range that was affordable for a hobbyist.
You can buy a cheap Nvidia card to "get your feet wet".
I would like to play with these things.
Re: Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi for Deep Learning
#10I wish they had a range that was affordable for a hobbyist. You can buy a cheap Nvidia card to "get your feet wet". I would like to play with these things.
Intel was selling the Xeon Phi 31S1P for under 200$ (it's back to 500$ now) for a limited time.
They will likely to have cheap version and promotions this time around too.