The Week In CPUs And Storage: Intel Shipping Purley (Skylake-EP) Xeons, Just Not To You

[Achaios]

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think we would care to buy this CPU?

Do you know many enthusiasts with Xeon-based rigs? What was the point of the "not to you" comment? Maybe you think I was seeing this CPU in my dream last night and I am now an alcoholic because Intel won't sell it to me?

 

[InvalidError]

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think we would care to buy this CPU?

I doubt the Purley models with FPGA will ever be popular with mainstream software... most software developers are struggling with simple multi-threading, imagine with full-scale explicit register-transfer-level parallelism with FPGAs!

Software and ASIC/FPGA design/programming require significantly different mindsets. I'm more of an ASIC/FPGA type of person.

 

[bit_user]

Just out of curiosity, what makes you think we would care to buy this CPU?

Do you know many enthusiasts with Xeon-based rigs?

The extreme desktop i7's are basically just E5 Xeons with a couple features disabled. They traditionally release at the same time. So, one upshot is that those users wanting lots of PCIe lanes for NVMe SSDs and multi-GPUs will be stuck with Broadwell-EP, for a while.

I doubt the Purley models with FPGA will ever be popular with mainstream software...

Maybe they won't even expose it to application-level developers.

Imagine loading the FPGA with virtual devices. You could install an encryption accelerator device, a deep learning accelerator device, or even a ray-tracing or CFD accelerator device, all without even having to open your case!

I don't see games using this, if that's what you mean. It'll probably be for professional, enterprise, and cloud deployments, for the foreseeable future.

Software and ASIC/FPGA design/programming require significantly different mindsets.

BTW, there are other ways to program FPGAs. OpenCL is one fairly recent development. Perhaps that might be one of the first ways they let 3rd party developers use it.