Is being 'obsolete' enough to be 'vintage' ?

[Melkhior]

... and therefore eligible to be discussed here ?

I just got myself a system that I wanted for my collection; a friend of mine was kind enough to hold on it since before Covid broke! Planets finally aligned and I could go fetch it at last.

Desktop form factor (big but not huge), single socket, 64 cores, 112 GiB of RAM in total. Plenty of SATA connectors and a couple of 16x PCIe Gen 3 connectors. Dedicated closed-loop liquid cooling system for the CPU, high-quality factory designed and built so should be OK for a while still. Motherboard and case are from Supermicro so no need to worry about reliability. Will run Debian 11, but could probably run Windows if I were masochistic enough.

And yes - obsolete! Because it's a Xeon Phi 7210 CPU ("Knights Landing", KNL), that Intel originally designed for the HPC (High-Performance Computing, a.k.a. Supercomputing) market, and each of the core is a pathetic Atom-based little thing at 1.3 GHz with a big vector engine bolted on (the first implementation of AVX-512, showing up before Skylake-SP the first of the Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum Xeons). The only market was big supercomputers, and it wasn't very successful there, leading Intel to cancel all planned successors. It's next to useless for anything other than running HPC-style numerical codes, and even for that use case it isn't that great as you need a lot of effort to make the codes run efficiently. It's death was probably well-deserved, if you ask me. The one I got was originally intended for software porting so the big supercomputers, not 'normal' server/desktop use; they are not very common, and are the only way to get a KNL at home (supercomputer racks are quite large...).

They are nonetheless a landmark in computing history, being the first CPU with on-package memory with really high bandwidth, featuring 16 GiB of MCDRAM offering 400+ GB/s, in addition to the six DDR4 channels (where are the other 96 GiB). The next time on-package memory would be used in a CPU would be the Fujitsu A64FX (at the heart of #1 Japanese supercomputer "Fugaku"), but without DDR, and not exactly a household name. The upcoming generation of Intel Xeon ("Sapphire Rapids") should finally bring back the combination of fast on-package memory with external DDR to Intel's CPU, this time with "big" cores.

So by now no-one want them anymore despite them being only 6 years old. They are obsolete. They are historically meaningful. But are they technically vintage?

 

[Androda]

I think most people refer to 'vintage' as 'I had this when I was a kid and now I'm 30+'. In general I'm in favor of anything which is 'abandoned' needing a place to be discussed, and why not here?

This sounds like a seriously cool system though, what a strange combination of design choices.

 

[Melkhior]

@Androda Yes, weird system, really not general-purpose. The MCDRAM is great, but for HPC 16 GiB wasn't enough (HBM is 32 GiB in the A64FX, likely 64 GiB in Intel's Sapphire Rapids or the european-designed Arm-based SiPearl Rhea), so you either had to rely on 'cache mode' (MCDRAM is just a big cache for the DDR) or to allocate handle the duality of memory by hand... The slowness of the core didn't help sequential parts of the codes, including going to the OS or non-numerical libraries (e.g. to talk to the filesystem or the network).

Parallel compile could fly if you had enough files to do in parallel; but any big file would cause a sequential bottleneck and slow down the overall time. Fortran and C, fine. Large C++ file with templates? Ouch. The FFTW3 library for instance has tons of codelets to compile, but ends up bottlenecked by generating/compiling the few really large ones. And supercomputers mostly use remote/distributed filesystems, killing I/O latency (vs. a local drive) and compile time. KNL really wants a local drive. I've put a couple of SAS drives on an old 1068e SAS controller in a ZFS mirror on mine, it helps (a bit...).

It was a bold move from Intel to try such an architecture, but they were already sort-of-failures before being realeased: the original design was the Larabee x86-based GPU, which was never released; it was reworked into the original Knight Ferry PCIe-based accelerator (KNF), which wasn't commercialized (but available to Intel's HPC partners). The follow-up was Knights Corner (KNC), the first-generation Xeon Phi, another PCIe-based accelerator, the first to be sold commercially. Neither were 'pure' x86-64, although KNC came quite close (but was missing e.g. SSE so couldn't be ABI-compliant). KNC had very limited deployment because it didn't offer much of an edge over contemporary GPUs. KNL, as a full-blown CPU, was to be the more 'mainstream' one for the HPC market... but it was too complex to optimize for for most users and ended up being the end of the line for the architecture. Having one mean I have now almost the full line-up (I had both KNF and KNC already, though neither are deployed in a system, Larabees are almost non-existant outside of Intel).

Edit; link to supermicro's site for the machine

 

[Patrick]

agree with Androda, vintage is in the eye of the beholder. and usually its "whatever i used when i was a kid (+ or - some amount of time)"

Like, i wouldn't talk about intel based macs running modern-ish Mac OS X at this site. even if Apple names them obsolete or vintage. .. but i'm old.
(but that shouldn't stop other people from talking about them if they want)

anyways you seem enthusiastic for it. so this is prolly a pretty good place to talk about weird Xeon Phi processor based computers. even if they are only a few years old now...
I wouldn't want to stop you

 

[luminescentsimian]

I don't think this site is specifically for vintage stuff, as long as you're Tinkering with it it seems like fair game

 

[Melkhior]

Thanks all I guess adding the LSI1068e SAS controller qualify as very simple 'tinkering' ;-) I do have a love-hate relationship with those - worked a lot on KNL for a while, and while it wasn't easy or pleasant, I always wanted one.

Now if I could find a desktop form factor Itanium...