# Any interest in Intel's Xeon Phi compilation wise?

## CaptainBlood

Hi dear all,

Intel's Xeon Phi PCIE cards seems to be sold @ very special price...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNjY

Is it any interest from a portage point of view?

Thks 4 ur attention.

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## N8Fear

Afaik the Phi is mostly a FPU and since compiling shouldn't be much FPU work (and additionally you would need a python interpreter with Phi support), I guess that it isn't that much of use for portage. On the other hand: for that price it's almost a crime not to get one (especially if you get a few friends and order a bunch of them for $125 a piece or something like that)  :Wink: 

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## CaptainBlood

I wasn't shure it was FPU,

No interest from a gentoo perspective.

I agree with your second opinion.

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.

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## Zucca

*BUMP*

 *N8Fear wrote:*   

> Afaik the Phi is mostly a FPU and since compiling shouldn't be much FPU work (and additionally you would need a python interpreter with Phi support), I guess that it isn't that much of use for portage.

 

What I've read is that all the cores are x86 Atom derivatives. If not used as a pure coCPU the card can run its own OS.

I like the idea of having a "virtual" machine inside my PC that I could utilize in crosscompiling stuff and propably in video encoding too...

Now that Intel has ended the support for card based Phis I'll see if the prices drops... Next step would include a new motherboard that is compatible with the Phi...

Some have ran Gentoo even: http://industrialinformatics.fel.cvut.cz/xeon-phi-installation-gentoo-linux

Some reports aren't so encouraging intead.

Now... I'd like to know if it's worth of it when my main uses for the card would be:

 cross compiling

 video encoding

 graphical rendering tasks, like very detailed 3D fractals etc, that need to be accurate

OpenCL could be used in some of the cases but sometimes there simply isn't support for it. Or in case of video encoding it may be even slower.

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