The Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor: What is it and why should I care? Part 0: Introduction

PART 0: “Introduction”

Believe it or not, this small series of 4 blogs (including this introduction) started off as a movie script. Yes, I admit to this being a little bit of an exaggeration. The “movie” will ultimately consist of two 10-minute short videos. After having struggled with writing this script for a few hours, I realized that, to get any traction, I had to start out in a media that I was already familiar with. Outside of engineering-through-presentation, the form I am most acquainted with is blogging. Originally, the result was not going to be a real blog, just a format that I could take and transform into my short video scripts. Unfortunately, my tendency to gab (an Americanism basically meaning that I talk a lot) resulted in an unintended treatise that I ultimately broke up into these forthcoming 3 blog contributions:

PART 1: “Fitting it all on one slab of silicon”

PART 2: “Getting even more parallelism”

PART 3: “Splitting Hares and Tortoises too”

Over the next few weeks, I will release them periodically in (relatively) small byte sized bits. Please feel free to comment. If I cannot answer, I will find someone who can.