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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

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51–60 of 165 posts

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#51

I have the original Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 4.1ghz and I’ve been pretty happy with it. As a developer I can’t find much reason to upgrade 2 years after its release. Single core improvements (from AMD or Intel) aren’t game-changing. More cores won’t do anything for me (.NET Core, angular, etc) I’ve considered switching back to intel for their 5ghz processors but based on benchmarks, I wouldn’t see anything b…

They're doing both. AMD has ramped single-core performance, at least from an IPC perspective, massively. From Excavator (2015) to Ryzen we saw a 52% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 1000 to 2000 (Zen+) we saw a 3% increase in IPC. From Ryzen 2000 to 3000 (Zen2) we saw a 15% increase in IPC. From 2015 to 2019 we saw a total IPC boost on the AMD side of over 80%, and an increase in max core count in the desktop line of 433%…

To be fair, Excavator was pretty poor compared to the Intel offerings that generation.

But 15% the last generation is definitely impressive, especially when compared to the 3-5% gains from 14++++ that Intel has been offering.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#53

I have the original Threadripper 1950X overclocked to 4.1ghz and I’ve been pretty happy with it. As a developer I can’t find much reason to upgrade 2 years after its release. Single core improvements (from AMD or Intel) aren’t game-changing. More cores won’t do anything for me (.NET Core, angular, etc) I’ve considered switching back to intel for their 5ghz processors but based on benchmarks, I wouldn’t see anything b…

I'd love to have even a 1st gen ryzen to know what it's like to be able to compile massively without feeling it.

Right now my poor x201 overheats to death if I use rustc carelessly.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#54
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you do, in most cases you won't use them on all your workloads. This means not all your boxes need to be Intel.

I would hope that your production hardware matches your developer / staging / testing hardware. Lets say production is 50% slower than what's tested in staging / developer test cases. Is it the data in production that causes this performance loss? Or is it hardware differences? If you are using Intel tools to debug performance problems on developer / testing stages, you probably want to keep using those Intel tools i…

Said interesting networking optimization is a gaping security home that has already been exploited in the wild.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#55
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in this space... and let's just say that MKL is definitely NOT well optimized for AMD's chips. You'll be lucky to get 10-20% efficiency. Nevermind openblas.

Intel optimizes these libraries down to the stepping level of the CPUs. So not surprising if they are not optimized at all for AMD

Is it anything like the way their compiler detected SSEn in a way that guaranteed it wouldn't use those instructions on AMD processors even if they supported them?

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#56
post #24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BLAS & Lapack subset of the API of the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) is very well implemented in open source projects such as OpenBLAS and BLIS: https://github.com/flame/blis Both are well optimized for AMD CPUs.

I work in this space... and let's just say that MKL is definitely NOT well optimized for AMD's chips. You'll be lucky to get 10-20% efficiency. Nevermind openblas.

This is well documented: https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49, https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#112.

It goes very far back to MMX: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155593&cid=13042922

tldr: Intel's compiler doesn't optimize using standardized instructions on non-Intel hardware.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#57
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but memory/IO is a much bigger issue in this scenario than processing power. While running a cluster in VMs, I'm frequently limited by IO (and if your VMs use more memory than it's physically available, you'll quickly descent into swap hell) well before my CPUs register a significant uptick in usage. And, mind you, my workstation is 4 year old Xeon with 64 gigs of memory and reasonably fast (but not amaz…

I really hope the 3000-series Threadripper is 8-channel like its server counterpart. 8 16GB DIMMs gets you 128GB, and a significant amount of memory bandwidth. You also have enough PCI-E lanes to either stripe or partition your I/O in such a way to work around any major bottlenecks.

There will be a new socket for 8 channel ones. sWRX8. These are not unlocked and essentially baby version of Epyc.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#58

I'd rather choose really big caches per core than really big number of cores.

Zen2 is 16MB L3 per ccx across the entire stack (hence why even the Ryzen 5 3600 is 32MB of L3 - it has 2 CCXs). There's no reason to assume this won't be true on Threadripper 3000. So a 32-core Threadripper 3000 would have at least 128MB of L3.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel optimizes these libraries down to the stepping level of the CPUs. So not surprising if they are not optimized at all for AMD

Is it anything like the way their compiler detected SSEn in a way that guaranteed it wouldn't use those instructions on AMD processors even if they supported them?

Of course. It's very much intentional, and "not optimized for AMD" is putting it very very mildly. They don't need to optimize purely for stepping level, they could provide sane codepaths for when the CPU flags indicate certain features.

See my other comment on this topic.

Re: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 32-core CPU is more bad news for Intel

#60
post #2

AMD is in a really good position right now. Intel still has the lead in low idle power which is good in laptops. Ryzen lets different cores have different max frequencies so if your code is single threaded and your operating system isn't the newest that could be a reason to go Intel. Likewise if its single threaded and can take advantage of AVX-512 or the Intel Math Kernel Library. But otherwise?

The main selling point for Intel isn't speed anymore. Intel still has superior performance counters and debugging features. Mozilla's rr (Record and Replay framework) only works on Intel for example, and Intel vTune is a very good tool. AVX512 is also an advantage, as you've noted. There are other instruction set advantages: I think Intel has faster division / modulus operator, and also has single-clock pext / pdep (…

It also has superior vulnerabilities
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