Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors and PC Laptops

[Quant_Geek1]

Is it possible to use the Xeon Phi coprocessor boards on a PCIe to Thunderbolt 3 chassis?  Will it work?  I have a PC laptop and would love to add a xeon phi board to the mix.  I already have two SLI GTX 1080s on the laptop for CUDA development, but I also want to use the xeon phi coprocessor...

Thanks,

John

[Quant_Geek1]

Thanks Sergey!  Unfortunately, I can't release the BIOS modifications as it is custom-tailored to my laptop.  MSI installs an unqiue ID to each laptop and hence the BIOS files are only meant for my laptop. I suspect it also becomes a support liability for them as the options are all unsupported and hence there is a potential that the laptop might not boot with an unsupported setting.

Most PCs and laptops these days have the support for Above 4GB Decoding, but not all vendors enable them.  Dell and HP are a bit more troublesome as they tend to do their own thing, making it more difficult to customize...

[SergeyKostrov]

>>...I can't release the BIOS modifications as it is custom-tailored to my laptop. MSI installs an unqiue ID to >>each laptop... I'm impressed that MSI does such customizations. During my last call to Dell Canada I was on the phone for ~30 minutes and they were "throwing" me from one department to another. In total, I spoke with four different representatives and have zero result.

[Quant_Geek1]

Sergey,

MSI has a whole forum for customized BIOS on their support forum, really impressive.  What is the model of your laptop?  There might already be a customized bios for it in some of the enthusiast websites.  There are a lot of hardware aficionados who want to tweak their laptops and PCs for optimal performance and hence the BIOS was hacked to enable as much options as possible...

John

[SergeyKostrov]

>>...MSI has a whole forum for customized BIOS on their support forum, really impressive. What is the model of your laptop? It is a Dell Precision M4700 Mobile Workstation.

[ibanescu__bogdan]

Hello Quant geek / John,

I'm currently engaged in a dialogue with someone from my laptop's manufacturer's tech lab. The conversation revolves around unlocking specific bios options such as the " above 4Gb decoding " one.

My goal is to connect my laptop to an intel xeon phi coprocessor similarly to you. In fact, I'm aiming for the same setup ( laptop + Xeon phi coprocessor + AKiTio Node ).

The difference, however, is that my manufacturer is different, though the specifications are comparable (I'll be using a Clevo)

Are there any other BIOS -related options which I may need to ask my manufacturer to unlock for me in order to get the same setup to work?

Thank you,

B.

[Rehman__Dogs]

Quant.Geek wrote:

Hi Gastón,

I am currently working with MSI Engineers to see if they can enable the BIOS settings on my laptop so that the "Above 4GB Decoding" option becomes available via a custom BIOS.  So, hopefully, it will work.  Attached is my Device Manager output indicating the troublesome MMIO resources being exhausted.  At this point, I am 90% of the way, but the remaining 10% is the critical part...

John

Nice Question