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Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

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Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#51

>In our own internal tests, it improved application performance by up to 30%. this post would have been interesting if they had included those tests.

This is from our own internal workloads, including things related to Search. If you run say specint_rate2006 (as Intel did for Haswell to Broadwell [1]), you'll see even higher results. We just wanted to call out that even for our own internal benchmarks, these things are seriously great (and we don't make much use of vectorization!).

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

[1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/server/xeo...

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#52
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please relay back to your team that the moment you get Postgres for your Cloud SQL product you'll get a lot of AWS converts.

Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?

Managed Kubernetes.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#53

I'd rather wait for Ryzen. You won't know which Skylake processor you're getting - the gimped one or the non-gimped one. AMD tends to keep their features consistent across the line.

Zen doesn't even have full width AVX2 (256bit) units the comparison is quite invalid.

And Ryzen isn't AMD's server product.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#54
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please relay back to your team that the moment you get Postgres for your Cloud SQL product you'll get a lot of AWS converts.

Out of curiosity, why would you prefer Google Cloud to AWS?

Killer network.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#55

Why is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular set of needs?

Yes it's in the article.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#56
post #2

Hopefully it will be the the first to offer the much cheaper AMD Ryzen/Naples, too.

Any idea on Naples timeframe for retail? I'm hoping to build a small workstation in a few months and 32 cores sounds like it might let me browse hacker news faster.

Not sure about Naples, but Ryzen is only being released on 8/16 c/t, and other lesser variants will be released in about 3~4 months. AMD said in January that Naples will release H1 2017. The Naples release cadence will be similar?

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zen doesn't even have full width AVX2 (256bit) units the comparison is quite invalid.

And Ryzen isn't AMD's server product.

Naples doesn't have it either, it's the same CCX.

Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake

#59

Why is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular set of needs?

Skylake is an amazing upgrade, more so than even the Haswell bump. Beyond just the clock-for-clock kind of improvements, AVX512 is a huge win for many vectorized workloads (see my other comment about waiting nearly 10 years for it...). Linear algebra (or ML if you prefer), rendering, and even string operations (operating on 512-bits per instruction is a win over 256) are all a lot faster.
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