Belated 2016 showdown! Xeon Phi vs Nvidia render results on 4.12

Snuggins

Found a Knights Landing workstation for a lunchtime project at work, with a supermicro K1SPE motherboard - 64 cores of Xeon Phi watercooled, 96GB ddr4 memory , using the 16GB of xeon phi mcrdram as an L3 cache. Took forever to get Windows installed and daz to launch without the horrible "aspeed" onboard video interfering even when disabled in the bios, since I had a 970gtx for the video. After setting every bios option every which way over a series of lunches this week, (and waiting the 5 minutes or so it takes to get through the long server-style boot process every time I made a change) I was about to give up when today "Creating Main Window..." actually completed and the Daz viewport popped up, awaiting my command!  I had to know! How would it do with Daz? Especially since 4.12 cpu rendering is much improved and uses the Intel Embree renderer which is Xeon Phi aware (at least the open source build can be configured that way last time I checked)

Mind you this is circa 2016 hardware. But now we can answer some questions basically nobody had back in 2016! 

Bottom line: About 6x slower than a 970GTX when rendering a stock Genesis 8 Female alone with the Ruins HDRI in a clean install of Studio 4.12. Attached is the log file, first I used both devices CPU + GPU, then just GPU, then just CPU.

Took about 200 iterations to converge for both GPU and  CPU: 20s for the 970 GTX, and about 120s for the CPU. By the way, my 2019 iMac with Core i7 renders in a time comparable to the 970gtx, great work improving the cpu render time!

I didn't run the standard test scene, I will download that and give it a try or anything else if someone is still curious, next week. Of course a big advantage would be the size of the scene since the 970 only has 4G of vram . Also if there's any tricks to get it to run more optimally on the phi, I would be interested to know. I didn't try all the memory model configurations once it actually ran was afraid to quit daz since it seems almost random the hoops one jumps through to get it to launch successfully. And after all that, kind of a yawner. oh well.