10 ms·

The biggest indicator of the success of AMD Threadripper line to me is that Intel has been forced to cut the price of their newly released i9-10980XE CPU by $10

The biggest indicator of the success of AMD Threadripper line to me is that Intel has been forced to cut the price of their newly released i9-10980XE CPU by $1000 compared to i9-9980XE while maintaining practically indistinguishable performance.

bitL 7y ago
The only advantages are AVX512 and optimized Intel compiler/libraries now.
- a012 7y ago
  Intel has so many resources, so when their hardware isn't competitive enough they have software to the rescue.
  - NullPrefix 7y ago
    Read: Software patches to hardware vulnerabilities.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  > optimized Intel compiler/libraries now And that's just cheating anyway. Intel's libraries refuse to use some instructions on AMD's CPU that the CPU supports, and instead downgrade to slower legacy versions. Cite[0]. [0] https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
  - bitL 7y ago
    I've tried to use MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE=5 trick on a Threadripper but it had no effect on scikit-learn nor matrix factorization inside MKL.
  - sebazzz 7y ago
    This almost calls from a microcode patch or kernel driver from AMD to mitigate this, if at all possible.
  - ashleyn 7y ago
    If all Intel has left over the competition is artificial vendor lock-in, they're in big trouble.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      CPU for desktops has been commoditized. Intel does a lot in networking, RAM, and storage. Not to mention having almost all of the server space.
      - rbanffy 7y ago
        Desktops is relatively low growth and Intel holds a lot os sway with major integrators. There are about a handful of AMD offers at Dell or Lenovo and dozens of Intel ones.
        HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        And I just ordered an HP laptop with a Ryzen APU. Voting with wallets counts, people! If you want to see more AMD laptops, buy them!
        bitL 7y ago
        You should have waited for 4000U series... By then you might even have HiDPI screens on AMD laptops...
        NullPrefix 7y ago
        There's always something better on the horizon
        bitL 7y ago
        4000U should make 3000U/H completely obsolete, it's the first mobile Zen 2 APU series.
  - justinjlynn 7y ago
    You think that's bad? Try getting Intel libraries like Embree to compile on PowerPC/OpenPOWER systems. It seems designed to be almost entirely impossible to port to new architectures... just about every piece of software released by Intel is made like this. SMH
    - berkut 7y ago
      TBB has support for PowerPC and Sparc: Intel accepted patches. It's not that difficult to port Embree to other architectures, at least for the 4-wide stuff: you just need intrinsics wrappers, and a bit of emulation for the instructions PowerPC doesn't support.
      - justinjlynn 7y ago
        > not that difficult afaict, the thing uses multi-templated indirected hardcoded asm inlines instead of intrinsic calls - it is not "that difficult" but it is by no means simple and they've done precisely zero favours to anyone trying. They've really gone out of their way, with Embree, to make it crazy hard, if not impossible, to fully activate the built-in SSE/MMX to AVX compatibility shim headers GCC ships with too, where they even can be. sigh
  - gowld 7y ago
    It's only cheating if there exists an alternate compiler that works better on AMD. It may be not-nice for Intel to use this form of "DRM" to lock their high-performance compiler to Intel chips, but they don't owe AMD users a high-performance compiler. Now, if vendors are shipping pre-compiled software that has the enabled-for-Intel-only fast-paths and don't ofter AMD-optimized versions, those vendors are misbehaving (intentionally or not).
    - wjnc 7y ago
      I agree. It's funny that the lack of attention of AMD to software / drivers (say Blas / MKL, CUDA) is holding the adoption of their silicon back in certain markets even after they've surpassed Intel in performance.
      - sliken 7y ago
        AMD has a compiler (c, c++, fortran) and various math libs: libm for basics, blis/libflame for blas.
  - fluffything 7y ago
    That's not cheating. There are two problems here. The first problem is that AMD does not provide versions of those libraries tuned for AMD hardware. The investment of AMD into software for their hardware is close to zero, and without software, hardware is irrelevant. AMD has this problem when competing against nvidia in the GPU space, and against intel in the CPU space. The second problem is that buyers of AMD products demand that Intel would release their software optimized for AMD products as well, which is just nonsensical. First, Intel is not required to do this and have no reason to do so - if this software doesn't work for your hardware, either buy Intel, or use something else. Second, these people don't expect AMD to provide these libraries, and aren't willing to provide them themselves, so... combined with AMD culture of not investing in software, nothing will happen. That link is 10 years old, but these issues are at least 10 years older. That is, AMD has had 20 years to fix this, and nothing has happened. I mean, this might sound like captain obvious, but Intel and Nvidia have super good profilers for their hardware (VTune and Nsight). AMD provides uProf, which sucks, so if that is what their engineers are using for their libraries, it isn't a surprise that they don't perform good.
    - bitL 7y ago
      They commit patches to OpenBLAS which is still 2-3x slower on Zen 2 than MKL on Intel hardware. Intel has better software engineers for high-performance math it seems.
      - fluffything 7y ago
        > Intel has better software engineers for high-performance math it seems. Intel has software engineers for pretty much every application. AMD has very few software engineers.
        bitL 7y ago
        Yeah, that's quite unfortunate, however as AMD seems to be able to earn some $ in the following ~2 years they might go on SWE hiring spree...
  - sliken 7y ago
    To fix MKL for AMD Rome/Zen2 just do "export MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE=5" This helps quite a bit with Matlab (which uses MKL) as well. For Blas/Lapack like libraries look for Blis and libFLAME. Gcc-9.2.0 isn't bad, but if you want Zen2/Rome/Ryzen 3xxx optimizations I'd recommend AMD's AOCC, which is a tuned version of LLVM (including c, c++, and fortran). If you need FFTs look at amd-fftw. Basic low level math (pow, log, exp, exp2 and friends) library look at the "AMD Math library (libM).
- nextos 7y ago
  And better Linux compatibility, plus less heat on low end CPUs. But hopefully those 2 will change soon too.
- dnautics 7y ago
  Is avx512 an advantage really? Iirc the machine has to go into another mode where processing across the board becomes slower except for the avx instructions, which to me seems only useful for niche hpc "measuring contest" applications.
  - bitL 7y ago
    Even if 10980XE downclocks to 2.8GHz while using AVX512, it's still 10x faster in MKL than Threadripper 1/MKL. From the AnandTech review, 3D particle test was showing AVX512 effect nicely: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png 10980XE had 3.9x speedup compared to 3970WX per core using AVX512. So for some scientific computing purposes (maybe game physics?) AVX512 is worth it.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      For that price difference you can add a GPU.
    - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
      > (maybe game physics?) Not game physics, as it puts the CPU in a lower speed regime it'd have negative implications on the rest of the games performance. So far, that AVX512 requires this lower speed (due to thermals) is an implementation detail, and it could be expected that newer processes (Intels 10 or 7 nm?) would allow them to work AVX512 tasks on full speed. Until that happens, and everyone has AVX512 (because it'd be a massive fail to have a game that requires you to have a HEDT Intel processor to play), it'd be a nice gimmick to have on very specific tech demos, and performance sensitive scientific code that you know will run on a certain machine with certain characteristics.
      - Danieru 7y ago
        Games will ship with AVX512 special paths once the AMD chips in consoles support it. Until then it is just a fancy feature to make already fast CPUs a bit faster. Game programmers will put time into making slow CPUs faster. Outside tech demos or hardware marketing tie-ins no budget is allocated to making yet more spare capacity.

bitL 7y ago

The only advantages are AVX512 and optimized Intel compiler/libraries now.

a012 7y ago
Intel has so many resources, so when their hardware isn't competitive enough they have software to the rescue.
- NullPrefix 7y ago
  Read: Software patches to hardware vulnerabilities.
Someone1234 7y ago
> optimized Intel compiler/libraries now And that's just cheating anyway. Intel's libraries refuse to use some instructions on AMD's CPU that the CPU supports, and instead downgrade to slower legacy versions. Cite[0]. [0] https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49 https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
- bitL 7y ago
  I've tried to use MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE=5 trick on a Threadripper but it had no effect on scikit-learn nor matrix factorization inside MKL.
- sebazzz 7y ago
  This almost calls from a microcode patch or kernel driver from AMD to mitigate this, if at all possible.
- ashleyn 7y ago
  If all Intel has left over the competition is artificial vendor lock-in, they're in big trouble.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    CPU for desktops has been commoditized. Intel does a lot in networking, RAM, and storage. Not to mention having almost all of the server space.
    - rbanffy 7y ago
      Desktops is relatively low growth and Intel holds a lot os sway with major integrators. There are about a handful of AMD offers at Dell or Lenovo and dozens of Intel ones.
      - HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
        And I just ordered an HP laptop with a Ryzen APU. Voting with wallets counts, people! If you want to see more AMD laptops, buy them!
        bitL 7y ago
        You should have waited for 4000U series... By then you might even have HiDPI screens on AMD laptops...
        NullPrefix 7y ago
        There's always something better on the horizon
        bitL 7y ago
        4000U should make 3000U/H completely obsolete, it's the first mobile Zen 2 APU series.
- justinjlynn 7y ago
  You think that's bad? Try getting Intel libraries like Embree to compile on PowerPC/OpenPOWER systems. It seems designed to be almost entirely impossible to port to new architectures... just about every piece of software released by Intel is made like this. SMH
  - berkut 7y ago
    TBB has support for PowerPC and Sparc: Intel accepted patches. It's not that difficult to port Embree to other architectures, at least for the 4-wide stuff: you just need intrinsics wrappers, and a bit of emulation for the instructions PowerPC doesn't support.
    - justinjlynn 7y ago
      > not that difficult afaict, the thing uses multi-templated indirected hardcoded asm inlines instead of intrinsic calls - it is not "that difficult" but it is by no means simple and they've done precisely zero favours to anyone trying. They've really gone out of their way, with Embree, to make it crazy hard, if not impossible, to fully activate the built-in SSE/MMX to AVX compatibility shim headers GCC ships with too, where they even can be. sigh
- gowld 7y ago
  It's only cheating if there exists an alternate compiler that works better on AMD. It may be not-nice for Intel to use this form of "DRM" to lock their high-performance compiler to Intel chips, but they don't owe AMD users a high-performance compiler. Now, if vendors are shipping pre-compiled software that has the enabled-for-Intel-only fast-paths and don't ofter AMD-optimized versions, those vendors are misbehaving (intentionally or not).
  - wjnc 7y ago
    I agree. It's funny that the lack of attention of AMD to software / drivers (say Blas / MKL, CUDA) is holding the adoption of their silicon back in certain markets even after they've surpassed Intel in performance.
    - sliken 7y ago
      AMD has a compiler (c, c++, fortran) and various math libs: libm for basics, blis/libflame for blas.
- fluffything 7y ago
  That's not cheating. There are two problems here. The first problem is that AMD does not provide versions of those libraries tuned for AMD hardware. The investment of AMD into software for their hardware is close to zero, and without software, hardware is irrelevant. AMD has this problem when competing against nvidia in the GPU space, and against intel in the CPU space. The second problem is that buyers of AMD products demand that Intel would release their software optimized for AMD products as well, which is just nonsensical. First, Intel is not required to do this and have no reason to do so - if this software doesn't work for your hardware, either buy Intel, or use something else. Second, these people don't expect AMD to provide these libraries, and aren't willing to provide them themselves, so... combined with AMD culture of not investing in software, nothing will happen. That link is 10 years old, but these issues are at least 10 years older. That is, AMD has had 20 years to fix this, and nothing has happened. I mean, this might sound like captain obvious, but Intel and Nvidia have super good profilers for their hardware (VTune and Nsight). AMD provides uProf, which sucks, so if that is what their engineers are using for their libraries, it isn't a surprise that they don't perform good.
  - bitL 7y ago
    They commit patches to OpenBLAS which is still 2-3x slower on Zen 2 than MKL on Intel hardware. Intel has better software engineers for high-performance math it seems.
    - fluffything 7y ago
      > Intel has better software engineers for high-performance math it seems. Intel has software engineers for pretty much every application. AMD has very few software engineers.
      - bitL 7y ago
        Yeah, that's quite unfortunate, however as AMD seems to be able to earn some $ in the following ~2 years they might go on SWE hiring spree...
- sliken 7y ago
  To fix MKL for AMD Rome/Zen2 just do "export MKL_DEBUG_CPU_TYPE=5" This helps quite a bit with Matlab (which uses MKL) as well. For Blas/Lapack like libraries look for Blis and libFLAME. Gcc-9.2.0 isn't bad, but if you want Zen2/Rome/Ryzen 3xxx optimizations I'd recommend AMD's AOCC, which is a tuned version of LLVM (including c, c++, and fortran). If you need FFTs look at amd-fftw. Basic low level math (pow, log, exp, exp2 and friends) library look at the "AMD Math library (libM).
nextos 7y ago
And better Linux compatibility, plus less heat on low end CPUs. But hopefully those 2 will change soon too.
dnautics 7y ago
Is avx512 an advantage really? Iirc the machine has to go into another mode where processing across the board becomes slower except for the avx instructions, which to me seems only useful for niche hpc "measuring contest" applications.
- bitL 7y ago
  Even if 10980XE downclocks to 2.8GHz while using AVX512, it's still 10x faster in MKL than Threadripper 1/MKL. From the AnandTech review, 3D particle test was showing AVX512 effect nicely: https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph15044/113590.png 10980XE had 3.9x speedup compared to 3970WX per core using AVX512. So for some scientific computing purposes (maybe game physics?) AVX512 is worth it.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    For that price difference you can add a GPU.
  - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
    > (maybe game physics?) Not game physics, as it puts the CPU in a lower speed regime it'd have negative implications on the rest of the games performance. So far, that AVX512 requires this lower speed (due to thermals) is an implementation detail, and it could be expected that newer processes (Intels 10 or 7 nm?) would allow them to work AVX512 tasks on full speed. Until that happens, and everyone has AVX512 (because it'd be a massive fail to have a game that requires you to have a HEDT Intel processor to play), it'd be a nice gimmick to have on very specific tech demos, and performance sensitive scientific code that you know will run on a certain machine with certain characteristics.
    - Danieru 7y ago
      Games will ship with AVX512 special paths once the AMD chips in consoles support it. Until then it is just a fancy feature to make already fast CPUs a bit faster. Game programmers will put time into making slow CPUs faster. Outside tech demos or hardware marketing tie-ins no budget is allocated to making yet more spare capacity.