4 ms·

This amounts to little more than making a statement at the expense of your users. It would've carried that much more weight if it were _your_ low-mid 6 figures

• harry8 8y ago
  It's Intel's policy and silliness that is at the expense of this person's users. Making those users aware of it is absolutely defensible on the grounds of it being the right thing to do. Intel are relying on customers ignorance, in fact they're trying to contractually ensure it! The Streisand effect is exactly what they deserve.
• Jonnax 8y ago
  Intel isn't really that much far ahead to say that users are going to be negatively affected.
  • bluecalm 8y ago
    Intel is actually behind in performance/price ration by a wide margin at least on workloads which can make use of many cores. The margin is likely getting bigger after the latest patches.
• nalllar 8y ago
  It will likely benefit their users. AMD's EPYC processors are cheaper for the same performance as intel's, as well as allowing more memory per processor. As they allow more cores per socket this can also often massively reduce per-socket licensing cost, if you have the misfortune of using software which requires that.
• gnulinux 8y ago
  Well, AMD currently has better CPUs for high-performance computing, so OP's users would benefit from this public service announcement, if anything.
  • Symmetry 8y ago
    I thought it was the opposite of that? That is, AMD chips are currently great for most workloads but Intel still has a definite edge in working with big vectors of floating point numbers of the sort you usually encounter in HPC. Mostly because their core's vector units are 512 instead of 256 bits wide.
    • celrod 8y ago
      Skylake-X and certain Xeons have avx-512 (which includes two 512 bit fma units). The rest only have 256 bit wide vectors, like Ryzen. But they still have the advantage of two 256 bit fma units, while Ryzen instead relies on two 128 bit fma units, meaning the fma instructions critical to matrix operations are faster on Intel. I think the idea for HPC though is that you want to offload these highly vectorizable operations to a GPU. Or maybe you're doing a lot of Monte Carlo that it is hard to vectorize. I really do like avx-512 though. If you're writing a lot of your own code, and that code involves many small-scale operations and has control flow (like in many Monte Carlo simulations), it's a lot easier than mucking with a GPU. If you're using gcc though, be sure to add `-mprefer-vector-width=512`, otherwise it will default to 256 bit vectors (clang and Julia use 512 by default).