Would a typical load balancer/web server running NGINX doing SSL termination see an improvement switching to Skylake?
Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
181–190 of 214 posts
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#182I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
This violates the HN guidelines egregiously. If you do it again we will ban you. The rules don't change when someone else doesn't know what they're talking about.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725976 and marked it off-topic.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#183Oh, so now I can't voice my opinion until I've been "in the business" for x amount of years? Yeah, nice try. Another commenter already brought that issue up, but thanks for pointing it out again. I still think that it's quite silly to claim that Ryzen Rev. A may end up being a paperweight based on a mistake that took place a decade ago. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. And from what I read, it seems like it was an…
Please don't engage in flamewars on HN.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13725460 and marked it off-topic.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
All I'm saying is it would be better if you knew what you were talking about. AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years.
> AMD has been outsourcing verification to its customers for many years You have no idea what you're talking about if you think for a second that a large CPU vendor like AMD would delegate verification to "its customers". It's like saying that Boeing just builds planes and tells airlines to make sure they fly correctly before allowing passengers to board them.
> You have no idea what you're talking about
This is uncivil and not ok on HN. Please take time to edit this kind of swipe out of your comments here.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spending on GCP is more predictable than on AWS. Also the general behavior is more predictable. For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources. I believe that whatever GCP does, does better. Faster network, faster spinning and turning off servers, simpler quotas, etc. GCP doesn't offer that many services as AWS and most of those are not very compatible…
> For instance all pre-emptible instances are terminated in 24 hours. On AWS based on when they need the resources. Uhh, Google will terminate preemptible instances whenever they need the resources as well. Hence the name, "preemptible." https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/preemptible
True. What I meant is that the servers are going to be terminated in 24 hours, even if they don't need the resources atm. AWS doesn't terminate them up until they don't need them.
Also I personally find much easier to understand is the pricing. It's very consistent and simple. Preemptible servers are discounted by 80% from the regular ones. On AWS the price changes, also they only offer older generations while GCE offers any type at the same discount.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#186It's been awesome to see our Skylakes rolling in over the past several weeks. I personally have been waiting nearly 10 years for AVX-512 ever since playing with LRBni. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped a bit in our Skylake work).
I wonder why there isn't more interest in simt style approaches among cpu manufacturers, instead they are going for longer vectors with scatter/gather/masking (avx-512 and sve by arm/fujitsu).
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#187Hahaha. Meanwhile I've been running 2 machines with Skylake and a combined 24 cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 6x512G SSDs, unmetered 1Gbit/s public and 2,5Gbit/s internal for over half a year for a combined $150 total, in complete privacy and in full control of my hosts.. go dedicated, people.
As another has said, who is your vendor? I'm sure they would like some more customers :)
I'm guessing, perhaps unsurprisingly, that we won't find out.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
what do I have to consider as a software developer to benefit from these upgrade? Do I need special tools/libraries?
Simple process improvements that make Skylake faster will just be "there" -- some code will just be faster with no changes! For the numerical, AVX stuff -- it should be mostly automatic for you, if you're already using optimized libraries at the core -- MLK, BLAS, that kind of stuff. They'll be transparently upgraded for you -- ideally -- to take care of these things. They normally check what your CPU is at runtime,…
> I bet if you're using Intel MLK for example, it will probably "magically" get faster on these Skylake machines by using AVX512 automatically.
(Aside, I think you mean MKL.)
There is a 200MHz clock reduction when running AVX512 instructions. If your code makes heavy use of AVX512 there is of course still a big net win, but I'm curious of the impact with more heterogeneous workloads. We have an app that is a mixture of scalar and vector code. Some, but not all, of the vector code would benefit from 512 bit vectors. But how much does the clock slowdown when running this code bleed over into running the other non-AVX512 code? I guess I'm asking how quickly it clocks down, and how quickly the full clock speed is restored. Worst case it seems you could be running full time at a 200MHz slowdown due to blocks AVX512 instructions scattered throughout the application. Is that a valid concern?
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#189+1 for SGX support. Would be really cool to remotely attest the software you are running in a real-world cloud.
Re: Google Cloud Platform is the first cloud provider to offer Intel Skylake
#190Did Intel actually enable the TSX extensions in Skylake? If I'm not mistaken, they shipped it in the last couple of generations but disabled it after release. (Something like that?) It's something that I've wanted to play with for sometime. It's cool that GCE has them available as a service.
mobile chips have them disabled I believe
It's available on my laptop at least:
$ egrep '^(model name|microcode)' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz
microcode : 0x9e
$ egrep -o ' (hle|rtm) ' /proc/cpuinfo | head -n2
hle
rtm