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I am going to do some rendering experiments on a large scale computer system with massive number of processors. This system uses some Intel Xeon E5 processors and Intel Xeon Phi co-processors. I've read documents and developer guide of Xeon Phi co-processor but none of them mention details about OpenGL or DirectX.

I'm not familiar with Xeon Phi co-processor and I want to know if it supports OpenGL or DirectX for graphic processing on hardware level.

legends2k
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cxcfan
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    AFAIK it doesn't have hardware texture filtering units, implementing that purely in software would put it at a disadvantage. Compressed textures would suffer in particular. – harold Dec 24 '14 at 13:49
  • Here is an article that describes Knights Landing. Probably doesn't answer your direct question, but may give you some more familiarity: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/what-disclosures-has-intel-made-about-knights-landing – ChileAddict - Intel Feb 03 '15 at 19:06

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Technically OpenGL depends on nothing. Pure software implementations of OpenGL are perfectly valid and do exist. For example the Mesa softpipe implementation; you could try to optimize it for the Xeon Phi, though I doubt you'll beat even the most humble low cost entry level GPUs with it.

Of course most of the time you want OpenGL to be accelerated by a dedicated GPU. But a Xeon Phi optimized OpenGL implementation certainly is feasible (though doesn't exist to my knowledge). When Intel was pushing their Larrabee architecture it was meant as a new approach on realtime graphics; a OpenGL implementation for Larrabee would have been part of it. But Larrabee never saw the light of the world, it remained a Intel research project.

datenwolf
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  • It actually looks like this thing **is** Larrabee. Or at least what became of it. Yes, at some point Intel thought that Larrabee would put the hurt on traditional GPUs. But it turned out that... it didn't. – Reto Koradi Dec 24 '14 at 23:50
  • The current Intel Xeon Phi processor is very different from Larrabee. – Jeff Hammond Jan 02 '15 at 05:40