[Python-ideas] Type Hinting - Performance booster ?

[David Mertz]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 1:39 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Dec 2014 13:11:19 -0700
> David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
> > I think the 5-6 year estimate is pessimistic.  Take a look at
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi for some background.
>
> """Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture or Intel MIC (pronounced
> Mick or Mike[1]) is a *coprocessor* computer architecture"""
>
> Enough said. It's not a general-purpose chip. It's meant as a
> competitor against the computational use of GPU, not against
> traditional general-purpose CPUs.
>

Yes and no:

The cores of Intel MIC are based on a modified version of P54C design, used
in the original Pentium. The basis of the Intel MIC architecture is to
leverage x86 legacy by creating a x86-compatible multiprocessor
architecture that can utilize existing parallelization software tools.
Programming tools include OpenMP, OpenCL, Cilk/Cilk Plus and specialised
versions of Intel's Fortran, C++ and math libraries.


x86 is pretty general purpose, but also yes it's meant to compete with GPUs
too.  But also, there are many projects--including Numba--that utilize GPUs
for "general computation" (or at least to offload much of the
computation).  The distinctions seem to be blurring in my mind.

But indeed, as many people have observed, parallelization is usually
non-trivial, and the presence of many cores is a far different thing from
their efficient utilization.


> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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