by Steve Scott, Nvidia, on Apr 3 2012

The recent news and industry reaction regarding Intel’s forthcoming “Many Integrated Core” (MIC) accelerator has been interesting to watch. It appears Intel, like NVIDIA and AMD, has now concluded that hybrid architectures are the proper response to the growing power constraints of high performance computing.

While I agree with this, some of the discussions around programming the upcoming MIC chips leave me scratching my head – particularly the notion that, because MIC runs the x86 instruction set, there’s no need to change your existing code, and your port will come for free.

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Functionally, a simple recompile may work, but I’m convinced it’s not practical for most HPC applications and doesn’t reflect the approach most people will need to take to get good performance on their MIC systems.

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