Intel Pushes Their Linux-Friendly Xeon Phi

[ChrisXY]

I remember that some years ago intel was touting ray-traycing as the future of graphics, this card should probably be very good a it. Is there any open source ray-traycing engine?

There were several tech demos with the predecessor of knights corner, knights ferry, the last two being quake wars and wolfenstein:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_Wars:_Ray_Traced
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein:_Ray_Traced

I haven't seen a download for the code so you probably can't get it for free...

[F i L]

Also Parallella is MIMD whereas the Phi (according to WP) and GPUs are SIMD, so Parallella is more general (surprisingly).

I've always thought that was more future proof, really. I'm no engineer, but it makes sense to sacrifice chip complexity for scalability. Plus, it's probably easier to write/compile against. No special SIMD instructions or significant architectural changes from chip to chip (theoretically). Just simple cores at different amounts.