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Most HPC systems are focused on floating point though, and Zen's vector/AVX implementation doesn't match Intel's.
by erik 10y ago
Most HPC systems are focused on floating point though, and Zen's vector/AVX implementation doesn't match Intel's.
- m_mueller 10y agoThat only matters for applications that are fully vectorized however. Most real world HPC applications depend much more on memory bandwidth and/or multicore performance and how well the compilers can optimize for the vector units (typically not very well). If I can choose two cores with 128 bit vectors for the same money as one core with 256bit, I'll choose the two core system any day of the week.
- erik 10y agoI certainly agree that vector performance is overrated. But it seems to dominate HPC spending. At least on the top500. But maybe AMD can pick up some HPC spending for smaller clusters designed to run less specialized code? I don't know how big that market is.
- m_mueller 10y agoI do think it's big. What you see on top500 is the high end of the market, the big bulk is in small to medium sized clusters or in cloud infrastructure where people rather care for benchmarks like requests per second of some specific servers. There again memory throughput, non-vectorized performance and cores per dollar are probably the most relevant characteristics of a processor. And those who chase to have the highest flop numbers have switched to accelerators and custom chips anyways.