5 ms·

Not only that, but they also apparently recompiled Linpack with the Intel compiler -- which is notorious for favoring Intel chips -- before running the benchmar

by einr 8y ago

Not only that, but they also apparently recompiled Linpack with the Intel compiler -- which is notorious for favoring Intel chips -- before running the benchmarks. Some really shady stuff going on here.

geezerjay 8y ago
On the other hand, these shady practices are a testament to AMD's technical superiority, as the incumbent is showing himself to be very desperate to react although it has absolutely no answer to AMD's new line of products.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  That's not something you can cite or point to when justifying a purchasing choice to $pointy_haired_boss
- Koshkin 8y ago
  AMD does not have techinal superiority, as Intel cores have better single-thread performance. Look at the recent low-end i3-8100 - it is an amazing chip.
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    But Intel won't even give that to you. The i3-8100 doesn't have turbo boost, which means it's stuck at 3.6GHz and typically doesn't have faster single thread performance than AMD's faster chips. If you want Intel to sell you the one that hits 5GHz you have to pay for more cores which, if all you care about is single thread performance, you can't even use.
  - api 8y ago
    Single-threaded performance is a toss up and depends on work load. Overall AMD beats them on price/performance and multithreaded performance, which matter more for everything but some games and a few not easily parallelize-able tasks.
    - celeritascelery 8y ago
      > Single-threaded performance is a toss up and depends on work load. I would actually say the exact opposite is true. Single threaded performance is much more reliable and every single application can use it. Multithreaded performance is much more workload dependent, and there are many applications that can’t fully utilize it.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
      You might be surprised what is single-threaded bound in practice. Such as Video Editors: Adobe Premier in particular. https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=50616 https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=50616
- psyclobe 8y ago
  I like to hate on Intel as much as the next guy but as someone currently shopping for a new workstation, I still see Intel as having the better offerings across the board, at least if you're not taking price into consideration. Take for example their HEDT competitor, Threadripper. As much as I want to like it, the fact that two of the cores don't have direct memory access really is a problem. You can see the detrimental effects this can have: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13516/the-amd-threadripper-2-cpu-review-pt2-2970wx-2920x/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13516/the-amd-threadripper-2-...
jve 8y ago
I really dislike Intel narketing practices. And their history on how they treat AMD. Intel is a reputable company, with strong products. Yet they sometimes act like kids.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I think they already repented multiple times to ever had licensed x86 designs to other companies. Without AMD we would all be using some variation of Itanium.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Itanium had a great potential as the next-gen CPU arch. Now we're stuck with the heavily emulated x86.
    - colejohnson66 8y ago
      It even had an x86 emulator
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    Early on they had little choice. If they wanted to sell to the US government, they needed to allow other suppliers to compete.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      Were the other suppliers required to compete with x86 clones?
      - rbanffy 8y ago
        They had to compete against Intel. It's a quite sane policy: if you want to sell to me, make sure I'm not locked in with you.
        pjmlp 8y ago
rbanffy 8y ago
Did they run the icc-generated binaries on the Epyc processors? That's... questionable. Apart from that, I'm fine with seeing numbers from icc because, if I'm shopping for the highest possible performance, that's probably the compiler I'll use for my code.
- aarongolliver 8y ago
  from this [0] Performance results are based on testing or projections as of 6/2017 to 10/3/2018 (Stream Triad), 7/31/2018 to 10/3/2018 (LINPACK) and 7/11/2017 to 10/7/2018 (DL Inference) and may not reflect all publicly available security updates. LINPACK: AMD EPYC 7601: Supermicro AS-2023US-TR4 with 2 AMD EPYC 7601 (2.2GHz, 32 core) processors, SMT OFF, Turbo ON, BIOS ver 1.1a, 4/26/2018, microcode: 0x8001227, 16x32GB DDR4-2666, 1 SSD, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (4.17.0-041700-generic Retpoline), High-Performance Linpack v2.2, compiled with Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE 2018 for Linux, Intel MPI version 18.0.0.128, AMD BLIS ver 0.4.0, Benchmark Config: Nb=232, N=168960, P=4, Q=4, Score = 1095GFs, tested by Intel as of July 31, 2018. compared to 1-node, 2-socket 48-core Cascade Lake Advanced Performance processor projections by Intel as of 10/3/2018. Stream Triad: 1-node, 2-socket AMD EPYC 7601, tested by AMD as of June 2017 compared to 1-node, 2-socket 48-core Cascade Lake Advanced Performance processor projections by Intel as of 10/3/2018. DL Inference: Platform: 2S Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 CPU 2.50GHz (28 cores), HT disabled, turbo disabled, scaling governor set to “performance” via intel_pstate driver, 384GB DDR4-2666 ECC RAM. CentOS Linux release 7.3.1611 (Core), Linux kernel 3.10.0-514.10.2.el7.x86_64. SSD: Intel SSD DC S3700 Series (800GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 25nm, MLC). https://wccftech.com/intel-cascade-lake-advanced-performance-48-core-xeon-cpus-announced/ https://wccftech.com/intel-cascade-lake-advanced-performance...
  - rbanffy 8y ago
    How bad is icc on EPYC compared to, say, gcc?
api 8y ago
Even with all the shade, AMD still beats them in price/performance. That and performance/watt matter the most if you're building a big data center.
slededit 8y ago
Are they using the ICC compiled Linpack on the AMD chips too? I think its totally fair as long as they used GCC or other best in class compiler for AMD.

by einr 8y ago

geezerjay 8y ago

On the other hand, these shady practices are a testament to AMD's technical superiority, as the incumbent is showing himself to be very desperate to react although it has absolutely no answer to AMD's new line of products.

marmaduke 8y ago
That's not something you can cite or point to when justifying a purchasing choice to $pointy_haired_boss
Koshkin 8y ago
AMD does not have techinal superiority, as Intel cores have better single-thread performance. Look at the recent low-end i3-8100 - it is an amazing chip.
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  But Intel won't even give that to you. The i3-8100 doesn't have turbo boost, which means it's stuck at 3.6GHz and typically doesn't have faster single thread performance than AMD's faster chips. If you want Intel to sell you the one that hits 5GHz you have to pay for more cores which, if all you care about is single thread performance, you can't even use.
- api 8y ago
  Single-threaded performance is a toss up and depends on work load. Overall AMD beats them on price/performance and multithreaded performance, which matter more for everything but some games and a few not easily parallelize-able tasks.
  - celeritascelery 8y ago
    > Single-threaded performance is a toss up and depends on work load. I would actually say the exact opposite is true. Single threaded performance is much more reliable and every single application can use it. Multithreaded performance is much more workload dependent, and there are many applications that can’t fully utilize it.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    You might be surprised what is single-threaded bound in practice. Such as Video Editors: Adobe Premier in particular. https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=50616 https://www.pugetsystems.com/pic_disp.php?id=50616
psyclobe 8y ago
I like to hate on Intel as much as the next guy but as someone currently shopping for a new workstation, I still see Intel as having the better offerings across the board, at least if you're not taking price into consideration. Take for example their HEDT competitor, Threadripper. As much as I want to like it, the fact that two of the cores don't have direct memory access really is a problem. You can see the detrimental effects this can have: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13516/the-amd-threadripper-2-cpu-review-pt2-2970wx-2920x/7 https://www.anandtech.com/show/13516/the-amd-threadripper-2-...

jve 8y ago

I really dislike Intel narketing practices. And their history on how they treat AMD. Intel is a reputable company, with strong products. Yet they sometimes act like kids.

pjmlp 8y ago
I think they already repented multiple times to ever had licensed x86 designs to other companies. Without AMD we would all be using some variation of Itanium.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Itanium had a great potential as the next-gen CPU arch. Now we're stuck with the heavily emulated x86.
  - colejohnson66 8y ago
    It even had an x86 emulator
- rbanffy 8y ago
  Early on they had little choice. If they wanted to sell to the US government, they needed to allow other suppliers to compete.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    Were the other suppliers required to compete with x86 clones?
    - rbanffy 8y ago
      They had to compete against Intel. It's a quite sane policy: if you want to sell to me, make sure I'm not locked in with you.
      - pjmlp 8y ago

rbanffy 8y ago

Did they run the icc-generated binaries on the Epyc processors? That's... questionable. Apart from that, I'm fine with seeing numbers from icc because, if I'm shopping for the highest possible performance, that's probably the compiler I'll use for my code.

aarongolliver 8y ago
from this [0] Performance results are based on testing or projections as of 6/2017 to 10/3/2018 (Stream Triad), 7/31/2018 to 10/3/2018 (LINPACK) and 7/11/2017 to 10/7/2018 (DL Inference) and may not reflect all publicly available security updates. LINPACK: AMD EPYC 7601: Supermicro AS-2023US-TR4 with 2 AMD EPYC 7601 (2.2GHz, 32 core) processors, SMT OFF, Turbo ON, BIOS ver 1.1a, 4/26/2018, microcode: 0x8001227, 16x32GB DDR4-2666, 1 SSD, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (4.17.0-041700-generic Retpoline), High-Performance Linpack v2.2, compiled with Intel(R) Parallel Studio XE 2018 for Linux, Intel MPI version 18.0.0.128, AMD BLIS ver 0.4.0, Benchmark Config: Nb=232, N=168960, P=4, Q=4, Score = 1095GFs, tested by Intel as of July 31, 2018. compared to 1-node, 2-socket 48-core Cascade Lake Advanced Performance processor projections by Intel as of 10/3/2018. Stream Triad: 1-node, 2-socket AMD EPYC 7601, tested by AMD as of June 2017 compared to 1-node, 2-socket 48-core Cascade Lake Advanced Performance processor projections by Intel as of 10/3/2018. DL Inference: Platform: 2S Intel Xeon Platinum 8180 CPU 2.50GHz (28 cores), HT disabled, turbo disabled, scaling governor set to “performance” via intel_pstate driver, 384GB DDR4-2666 ECC RAM. CentOS Linux release 7.3.1611 (Core), Linux kernel 3.10.0-514.10.2.el7.x86_64. SSD: Intel SSD DC S3700 Series (800GB, 2.5in SATA 6Gb/s, 25nm, MLC). https://wccftech.com/intel-cascade-lake-advanced-performance-48-core-xeon-cpus-announced/ https://wccftech.com/intel-cascade-lake-advanced-performance...
- rbanffy 8y ago
  How bad is icc on EPYC compared to, say, gcc?

api 8y ago

Even with all the shade, AMD still beats them in price/performance. That and performance/watt matter the most if you're building a big data center.

slededit 8y ago

Are they using the ICC compiled Linpack on the AMD chips too? I think its totally fair as long as they used GCC or other best in class compiler for AMD.