21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X • Hacker News Board

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#151

Post by zozbot234 » Sat, May 10, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #122

Aurornis wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this article, they saw the following speeds: Original: 18 GB/s AVX2: 20 GB/s AVX512: 21 GB/s This is an AMD CPU, but it's clear that the AVX512 benefits are marginal over the AVX2 version. Note that Intel's consumer chips do support AVX2, even on the E-cores. But there's more to the story: This is a single-threaded benchmark. Intel gave up AVX512 to free up die space for more cores. Intel's top of the line consume…

> We'd have to look at actual Intel benchmarks to see, but if the AVX2 to AVX512 improvements are marginal, a multithreaded AVX2 version across more cores would likely outperform a multithreaded AVX512 version across fewer cores. Look at any existing heavily multithreaded benchmark like Blender rendering. The E-cores are so weak that it just about takes 2 of them to match the performance of an AMD core. If the only d…

> The E-cores are so weak that it just about takes 2 of them to match the performance of an AMD core.

That's not "weak". If you look at available die-shot analyses, the E-cores are tiny compared to the P-cores, they take up a lot less than half in area and even less in power. P-cores are really only useful for the rare pure single-threaded workload, but E-cores will win otherwise.

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#152

Post by constantcrying » Sat, May 10, 2025, 8:04 AM UTC

theropost wrote: post #106

I need this, just finished 300GB of CSV extracts, and manipulating, data integrity checks, and so on take longer than they should.

Why wouldn't you use a data format meant to store floating point numbers?

HDF5 gives you a great way to store such data.

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#153

Post by theropost » Sat, May 10, 2025, 8:59 AM UTC

constantcrying wrote: post #152

theropost wrote: post #106

I need this, just finished 300GB of CSV extracts, and manipulating, data integrity checks, and so on take longer than they should.

Why wouldn't you use a data format meant to store floating point numbers? HDF5 gives you a great way to store such data.

Sounds interesting, I'll give it a look. I'm unfortunately limited to CSV, XML, or XLS from the source system, then am transforming it and loading it into another DB.

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#154

Post by riehwvfbk » Sat, May 10, 2025, 1:06 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #88

sitkack wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what Intel does, they build up a market (Optane) and then do a rug pull (Depth Cameras). They continue to do this thing where they do a huge push into a new technology, then don't see the uptake and let it die. Instead of building slowly and then at the right time, doing a big push. Optane support was just getting mature in the Linux kernel when they pulled it. And they focused on some weird cost cutting move…

The rugpull on Optane was incredibly frustrating. Intel developed a technology which made really meaningful improvements to workloads in an industry that is full of sticky late adopters (RDBMSes). They kept investing until the point where they had unequivocally made their point and the late adopters were just about getting it... and then killed it! It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular ha…

One could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.

You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volume needed to cut costs.

So now imagine that you are at Intel deciding what initiatives to fund. The company is in trouble and needs to show some movement out of the red, preferably quickly. It also lost momentum and lost ground to competitors, so it needs to focus. What do you do? You kill all the side projects that will never make much money. And of course you kill a lot of innovation in the process, but how would you justify the alternative?

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#155

Post by hinkley » Sat, May 10, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

aolo2 wrote: post #149

hinkley wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a calculation for ns/row in the article that is never translated into rows per second but is about 27 ns/row, which is about 37,000 per second. Which means these rows are 570k apiece if that’s 21GB. Which seems like an awfully cooked benchmark.

That would be 37,000,000, not 37,000.

So ~570 per line. Still seems a bit contrived. I’d expect a SIMD version to still work line by line but I don’t know that I would try to shove that much into a line if I wanted to read it really fucking fast.

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#156

Post by kllrnohj » Sat, May 10, 2025, 1:45 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #151

kllrnohj wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We'd have to look at actual Intel benchmarks to see, but if the AVX2 to AVX512 improvements are marginal, a multithreaded AVX2 version across more cores would likely outperform a multithreaded AVX512 version across fewer cores. Look at any existing heavily multithreaded benchmark like Blender rendering. The E-cores are so weak that it just about takes 2 of them to match the performance of an AMD core. If the only d…

> The E-cores are so weak that it just about takes 2 of them to match the performance of an AMD core. That's not "weak". If you look at available die-shot analyses, the E-cores are tiny compared to the P-cores, they take up a lot less than half in area and even less in power. P-cores are really only useful for the rare pure single-threaded workload, but E-cores will win otherwise.

We're not comparing to Intel's P cores but AMDs cores. 8 of AMDs cores fit in 70.6mm2 on a high performance process, and take up a fraction of that space on a high density process (see the 192 core Zen 5c chips)

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#157

Post by ozgrakkurt » Sat, May 10, 2025, 2:01 PM UTC

riehwvfbk wrote: post #154

gnfargbl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rugpull on Optane was incredibly frustrating. Intel developed a technology which made really meaningful improvements to workloads in an industry that is full of sticky late adopters (RDBMSes). They kept investing until the point where they had unequivocally made their point and the late adopters were just about getting it... and then killed it! It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular ha…

One could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem. You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volum…

Isn’t NVMe disks basically same value as optane? Comments saying optane was amazing doesn’t make sense if NVMe is basically as good and there are other NVMe disk manufacturers

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#158

Post by riehwvfbk » Sat, May 10, 2025, 3:42 PM UTC

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #157

riehwvfbk wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem. You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volum…

Isn’t NVMe disks basically same value as optane? Comments saying optane was amazing doesn’t make sense if NVMe is basically as good and there are other NVMe disk manufacturers

They are not really the same.

First, NVMe is a protocol to access block storage. It can be used to access any kind of block device, Optane, SSD, NVDIMM, virtual storage on EC2, etc. So it's true that the protocol is the same (well, not quite - more on this in a bit), but that's like saying a server is the same as an iPhone because they can both speak TCP/IP.

What was the "more in a bit" bit? Persistent memory (PMEM) devices like NVDIMMs and Optane can usually speak two protocols. They can either act as storage, or as memory expansion. But this memory also happens to be non-volatile.

This was sold as a revolution, but it turned out that it's not easy for current operating systems and applications to deal with memory with vastly different latencies. Also it turns out that software is buggy, and being able to lose state by rebooting is useful. And so Optane in memory mode never really caught on, and these devices were mostly used as a storage tier. However: look up MemVerge.

So you are right that it turned out to be a faster SSD, but the original promise was a lot more. And here comes the big problem: because Optane was envisioned as a separate kind of product between RAM and SSD, the big price differential could be justified. If it's just a faster SSD - well, the market has spoken.

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#159

Post by justsid » Sat, May 10, 2025, 4:28 PM UTC

pezezin wrote: post #129

sitkack wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only works for fixed workloads, like accelerators, with no dynamic sharing.

Yeah, VLIW is still used for stuff like DSP and GPUs, but it doesn't make sense for general computing.

GPUs have long since moved away from VLIW as well

Re: 21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

#160

Post by arcfour » Sat, May 10, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

devmor wrote: post #72

adra wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm, maybe file based? JSON is the king if you count exchanges worldwide a sec. Maybe no 2 is form-data which is basically email multipart, and if course there's email as a format. Very common =)

I honestly wonder if JSON is king. I used to think so until I started working in fintech. XML is unfortunately everywhere.

JSON: because XML is too hard.

Developers: hey, let's hack everything XML had back onto JSON except worse and non-standardized. Because it turns out you need those things sometimes!