I appreciate the effort.
That is going to be good.
They said it couldn’t be done.
"You can’t use Xeon Phi with Ryzen„ - a random redditor.
“It just works”
Also high time to mod a proper bracket. Stacking it on the PSU with old SSD cases isn’t the way to go
I guess this is a bit of lazy teaser 
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A metal strip with two holes in it would do.
Then you just clamp the bracket between the metal strip and case.
Gonna do some workshop fabricobbling later this evening.
1 Like
And finally I got around to Fabricating a proper bracket.
Start with any old dual slot GPU bracket
Trace it out on paper and figure out the dimensions and cuts from the old xeon server bracket
Find some scrap
Unlocking the scrapper perk early on is useful, but not required.
Any old Optical drive/PSU/random bit of strongish steel will do.
Get your dust mask and Eyepro
Hot flying steel dust isn’t a new kind of vape flavour
Don’t forget the High Velocity toothbrush
Trace out your bracket on the metal with some marker
Slice and Dice
Check that all appendages are still attached once done.
Yeah that black dust, that’s steel dust. Don’t breathe that.
Give it a bit of polish to remove all the gnarly edges
Mark out the more complex cuts
A sharp blade is good for this
Get a workshop manicure
The higher RPM the better the end result 
Cut out the paper bracket
Some call this CAD, but today it’s PAD
Visualize what we’re trying to make for the viewers
Some reverse saw blade action
Skip photographing the step were you bent the flanges into place
Test fit
Mark holes for the screws with a black marker
Also skip photographing the drilling, because you’ve only got 2 hands
Combine everything into one silicon-metal sandwich
Time well spent
Looks like any ol’ Intel R&D test fit 
12 Likes
Oooooo lmk how it goes I’ve wanted one for yeeeeaaaarrrrs
2 Likes
Is there anything better then the Scrapper Perk + a Dremel and all the bits you would need 
Pretty cool indeed.
What do you plan to do with it? Have any compute workload in mind to put your thermal solution to the paces?
Finally after much pain and suffering I’ve actually managed compile a proper MPSS (Manycore Platform Software Stack) for my Xeon Phi. The last kernel Intel officially supported seems to have been 3.10 and for an unreleased / withdrawn MPSS version 4.10. Being originally compiled with GCC6.4 meant I found a tone of bugs that the old compiler missed.
That’s only about 5.7Gb of Code 
And basically includes a whole Linux kernel + distro built specifically for Xeon Phi.
Hahaha lol nope. More problems with the dkms module build 
It never ends
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Home stretch, just gotta rewrite a bunch of old page code to use the new atomic struct which as added in January this year
Probably about 1000 lines of foreign code in micscif_rma.h to review & rewrite.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/1/21/1231
And fix some of the random bits that are likely just moved/renamed header & functions
But that’s about enough for today.
Hella tired now 
5 Likes
Holy cow! That is great!
I don’t know and wont pretend to know what a huge chunk of that really means, but it is all still super cool.
I did hear it was a pain getting mpss running, but never tried myself. The forum posts on what to do were (are) beyond my current understanding.
Just a quick question. What are you (Catsay) planning on using your phi for?
For now I’m not planning to use it for anything critical/work project related.
I’ve already got a liberated ex-mining rig GPU farm running AMD ROCm / HIP code for some of my actual data processing (lots of OCR).
The Xeon Phi I’m first going to experiment on, explore the hardware.
Test the ISA, do some microarchitecture benchmarks. Probably run some blender OpenCL renders (Xeon Phi supports OpenCL) so all sorts of opencl stuff can run on it actually. I also plan on making some OpenCL & OpenMP comparison code. Pitting both old(TeraScale) and new GPU’s against the Phi. Explore the strengths and weaknesses of both.
Possibly do some Java & Python offload experiments someone asked me about.
But mainly I’m going to just explore and document things along the way, so if you’ve got things you’d like to see run on it feel free to make suggestions.
Lastly; just as a precaution to everyone else that might not quite understand what Xeon Phi is… It’s not a graphics card. It’s a big fat CPU with an extended x86 instruction set and big vector registers that comprise some of the ‘GPU-like’ elements.
So no we can’t run Crysis 
Or minecraft… 
2 Likes
You might’ve found something to try and do with it hahahaha
Maybe quake? Or something that runs on OpenGL?(Is it how it’s called?)
Just for funsies? hahaha
It has a whole bunch of tiny cores, right? So in theory, if each core was a node in a neural net, it should crunch those rather quickly.
I hope I don’t find one for less than 150€, else I will have 150€ less
4 Likes
Random update:
After a long period of screwing around with the Linux drivers and MPSS Stack
I decided to actually see if it’s even working and load it up in Windows.
And it is indeed working
And oh goody it drinks the power, 100W at idle and already running 64C. I’ve got a delta 16K RPM
(PFM0812HE-01BFY) fan strapped to it running 4500RPM just to maintain the idle temps.
And btw Intel MPSS SDK is horrible.
And just in general the software ecosystem around this is totally not as advertised in all of the marketing and training materials.
I attribute 90% of the failure of Xeon Phi to catch on, to the mess that is the MPSS stack.
I wanted to run a quick simple OpenCL test
It is definetly not like programming for a desktop CPU
Nothing about this thing is straight forward in any sense
You can’t just install the OpenCL runtime
No you need to then compile it for your machine
Then to compile it you need to install 11GB of Parrallel studio and 8GB of Visual Studio 2012
Then you need to build a new bootable base cpio image for the card because the last released one is missing a bunch of any useful tools and API’s
Then boot the card with that and setup an NFS share with your libraries etc
Then you can run your code
To get it working on Windows I’m gonna have to load Intel Parallel Studio XE
Which is usually a pain to get and costs an stupid amount of money
No wonder people where hesitant to develop for Xeon Phi
Intel started shoving the 3110P into their faces at $195 + Parallel Studio XE included at some stage in hopes people would use them.
More at 12 or whenever I log in again.
8 Likes
What I have determined so far is these things are not efficent at all for any code that also runs well/better on a GPU
They really need to be used for specific code with enough branch complexity that doesn’t run well on GPU’s
Experiences with Intel Xeon Phi in the Max-Planck Society
TLDR:
In moderately parallel applications traditional fat multicore CPU’s murder xeon Phi, (Especially Threadripper) in massively parallel applications GPGPUs rule. Xeon Phi is only barely competitive when you can perfectly parallelize AND vectorize your application.
If either one is not perfect forget Xeon Phi.
Also their cache hierarchy sucks BAWLLLS!
Attempts to manually approximate Cache Coherency are a figment of the designers imagination
The thing is dirty
6 Likes
Some playlists of relevance
Xeon Phi Coding & Hardware
Video course: Parallel Programming and Optimization with Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors
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Looks like it.
They fell into a bad nieche between GPUs and PCIe FPGAs. Either of which is rather easy to programm for.
Oof. I’m kind of disappointed. Was hoping something fun would come out of these Phi cards. Obviously not great, otherwise people would use them, but maybe something fun.
Looks like it is hard to even get them up and running, at least on Linux.
Looks like Intel had the same issue with Phi that Sony, Toshiba, and IBM had with Cell BE. It is unfortunate, how ever Cell BE seems to still have some good use cases (even though they are diminishing to niches) compared to Phi.