Buying a Knights Corner (aka SCC?, aka Larrabee?, … )

Prompted by a Softtalkblog post Nov. 29, 2011 --- shopping for PC cores.

Dear Softtalk, Re: The economics of core buying, or rational compute power buying. Most of the total available market, let's say 6B people, seem to only need SMS/vioce/web/video one/two core, i.e. cell/smart phone/pad/tablet; backed by powerful computer/switch communication infrastructure, and web farms --- 10's of thousands, 100's of thousands? millions? of multi-core boxes, maybe moving to "simple" multi-core ARMs, sans Flt Pt units & Graphics. Office workers with traditional desktop PC's and SW seems to be a mature market -- maybe 500M units? 1B? Home hybrid WebTV? Home Game market?
Adobe/AutoCad/Avid/etc. content creation SW machines ... insatiable core appetite? 1M units with 1M cores per unit? Sort of like HPC SciViz etc. All of the above is prolog to asking about Knights Corner.

Re: Econ of PC and KC purchase? If one has a (perceived) need for more performance, sort of like game hot rods, what is the point at which KC makes sense? If the KC's cores are very like PC's, might I buy a cheap base Dual core PC (if I can find one) and super charge it with an add-in Knights Corner (SCC) card? What will be the cross over price point? $5K Workstation? Will I be able to buy a $200 add-in KC @Fry's to add nitro power boost to my old PC? Will Adobe bundle KC with AE?

Just asking.

Art Scott

Peace Love Happiness PLH
Only One Earth OOE

Multicore Manycore Reality.

Survival Guide for Artists, creative types, working in the new medium of multicore/manycore PC Systems.
By Art Scott, Semasiographologist.
Copyright © 2008, by Art Scott. All rights reserved.


Executive Summary
It was soo hot on flat-land-world silicon . The inhabitants, called circuits, were using too much energy per unit of bit pushing work; there was a lot of friction. The circuits’ transistor minds were melting from heat stroke. They were going metastable, losing their minds! They didn’t know what state they were in, on or off.

Their clock was too fast, they had no time to decide anything, what was the Object?, their Function? They’d lost their Framework. They couldn’t live that way any longer, on a single core super fast hot silicon world. So wisely the circuit inhabitants put their transistor minds together and decided to go Green, use less energy per bit pushing unit, divide and chill out.

Thus single core sequential world ended (see them in a museum), and multi-/many-core world came to be, and it was good: cooler, greener, more capable; but there were new challenges: The Threads of their lives were incomprehensibly waaay complicated. Now that there were more cores, 2, 4, 8, 42, 80 ... 1024, how were they to work and play together? They need a new language, the bearded and unbearded are hard at work on a Coordination language.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode: Sequential Programmers meet Multi-, Many- core world --- go wild, then enter 12 steps to parallel concurrent zen.