5 ms·

It's doing 1TF sustained and no one ever sustains 100% of their theoretical peak, so we know the peak is higher than 1TF. Consider also the sandbagging of numbe

It's doing 1TF sustained and no one ever sustains 100% of their theoretical peak, so we know the peak is higher than 1TF. Consider also the sandbagging of number of cores as "50+". How big is the "+"? In reality the design will have a larger number that is then binned by yield and so forth to give a range of SKUs, as usual. Next, you're comparing a sustained number on DGEMM with theoretical peaks on other machines. Nvidia sustains <225GF on DGEMM with Fermi so this is 4-5x. Last I looked, AMD were sustaining ~500GF with Cayman, so this is 2x, and a much easier machine to sustain perf on for other codes compared to Cayman. If you consider a potentially sandbagged 2x sustained perf to be "relatively minor" then so be it. There are few public details provided but many of us have been programming with the Knights Ferry SDV kit in preparation for this part. So we have experience with the tools, with the use of lots of similar cache coherent x86 cores, etc. I can tell you this -- it's much easier to work with this than GPUs, and I've written a ton of code on all kinds of whacky machines, production compute code on GPUs included.

sausagefeet 15y ago
Where can I learn more about how all this hardware works?
onemoreact 15y ago
I don't see any mention of this chip doing DGEMM at 1TF. Just that it's sustaining 1TF performance, but you can write assembler code that get's within 1% of theoretical peak flops if your not trying to get anything done but, if you have a source feel free to give it. (Not that that even means much, AMD's getting 80% of theoretical max FLOPS on that benchmark and I assume Intel would pick the optimum benchmark for it's chip even if they had to design the chip around the benchmark.) Also, I don't see anything that suggests it's anywhere close to a production chip. More important, Knights Ferry chips may help engineers build the next generation of supercomputing systems, which Intel and its partners hope to delivery by 2018. Not to mention your comparing a preproduction chip with a year old chip that's running on a 2 year old process when AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are about to do a die shrink.
- stuntprogrammer 15y ago
  Sustaining 1TF on DGEMM was explicitly mentioned by Intel in the presentation/briefing. It's also mentioned in the press release: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/11/15/intel-reveals-details-of-next-generation-high-performance-computing-platforms http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011... "The first presentation of the first silicon of “Knights Corner” co-processor showed that Intel architecture is capable of delivering more than 1 TFLOPs of double precision floating point performance (as measured by the Double-precision, General Matrix-Matrix multiplication benchmark -- DGEMM). This was the first demonstration of a single processing chip capable of achieving such a performance level." Does it mean much? It means something to me, and is a great first step for those of us running compute intensive codes. They really wouldn't get far if they designed the chip only around being able to do this. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the article text is incorrect. The chip we're discussing is Knights Corner not Knights Ferry. The latter has been in early user hands for quite some time now and I've spent plenty of time hacking on it. Knights Corner is the new chip that is working it's way to production via the usual process with ship for revenue in 2012. The 2018 target is for an exascale machine, not shipment of initial MIC devices. TACC have already announced they'll be building out a 10 petaflop MIC based system next year to go operational by 2013. Yes, I'm comparing a chip that has not shipped, but given the perf advantage, given the tools and productivity advantage, given the multiyear process advantage Intel is sustaining, this is not a chip to be ignored. Knights Corner is shipping on 22nm. Other vendors have notoriously had difficultly on previous processes, depend on fabs like TSMC who are doing 28nm for them, and will be later to 14nm etc.
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Thanks for clearing that up, my google foo is weak when they use the wrong names. Still, it looks like they really do design for benchmarks: "Xeon E5 delivers up to 2.1* times more performance in raw FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second as measured by Linpack) and up to 70 percent more performance using real-HPC workloads compared to the previous generation of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors." 110% on benchmark = 70% in real world apps. Granted, if this works out great, I have seen Intel blow to many new 'high performance' chips to expect much still they might just pull this one off. Unlike say the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium etc PS: I always look at what Intel get's x86 to do much like how Microsoft could develop software, it's not that the capability is awesome so much as watching a mountain of hacks dance. They have a huge process advantage and can throw piles of money and talent at the process but they are stuck with optimization's made when computers where less than 1% as powerful.

sausagefeet 15y ago

Where can I learn more about how all this hardware works?

onemoreact 15y ago

I don't see any mention of this chip doing DGEMM at 1TF. Just that it's sustaining 1TF performance, but you can write assembler code that get's within 1% of theoretical peak flops if your not trying to get anything done but, if you have a source feel free to give it. (Not that that even means much, AMD's getting 80% of theoretical max FLOPS on that benchmark and I assume Intel would pick the optimum benchmark for it's chip even if they had to design the chip around the benchmark.) Also, I don't see anything that suggests it's anywhere close to a production chip. More important, Knights Ferry chips may help engineers build the next generation of supercomputing systems, which Intel and its partners hope to delivery by 2018. Not to mention your comparing a preproduction chip with a year old chip that's running on a 2 year old process when AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are about to do a die shrink.

stuntprogrammer 15y ago
Sustaining 1TF on DGEMM was explicitly mentioned by Intel in the presentation/briefing. It's also mentioned in the press release: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011/11/15/intel-reveals-details-of-next-generation-high-performance-computing-platforms http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011... "The first presentation of the first silicon of “Knights Corner” co-processor showed that Intel architecture is capable of delivering more than 1 TFLOPs of double precision floating point performance (as measured by the Double-precision, General Matrix-Matrix multiplication benchmark -- DGEMM). This was the first demonstration of a single processing chip capable of achieving such a performance level." Does it mean much? It means something to me, and is a great first step for those of us running compute intensive codes. They really wouldn't get far if they designed the chip only around being able to do this. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, the article text is incorrect. The chip we're discussing is Knights Corner not Knights Ferry. The latter has been in early user hands for quite some time now and I've spent plenty of time hacking on it. Knights Corner is the new chip that is working it's way to production via the usual process with ship for revenue in 2012. The 2018 target is for an exascale machine, not shipment of initial MIC devices. TACC have already announced they'll be building out a 10 petaflop MIC based system next year to go operational by 2013. Yes, I'm comparing a chip that has not shipped, but given the perf advantage, given the tools and productivity advantage, given the multiyear process advantage Intel is sustaining, this is not a chip to be ignored. Knights Corner is shipping on 22nm. Other vendors have notoriously had difficultly on previous processes, depend on fabs like TSMC who are doing 28nm for them, and will be later to 14nm etc.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  Thanks for clearing that up, my google foo is weak when they use the wrong names. Still, it looks like they really do design for benchmarks: "Xeon E5 delivers up to 2.1* times more performance in raw FLOPS (Floating Point Operations Per Second as measured by Linpack) and up to 70 percent more performance using real-HPC workloads compared to the previous generation of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors." 110% on benchmark = 70% in real world apps. Granted, if this works out great, I have seen Intel blow to many new 'high performance' chips to expect much still they might just pull this one off. Unlike say the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium etc PS: I always look at what Intel get's x86 to do much like how Microsoft could develop software, it's not that the capability is awesome so much as watching a mountain of hacks dance. They have a huge process advantage and can throw piles of money and talent at the process but they are stuck with optimization's made when computers where less than 1% as powerful.