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"Consistent x86 ISA" in that slide is clearly a dig at Intel. AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores.

SloopJon 3y ago
Last I checked, there aren't any Xeons with E-cores. However, you're right: the most direct competitor to Bergamo seems to be Sierra Forest, a chip that will have nothing but E-cores (and no AVX-512).
- adrian_b 3y ago
  The Intel "Sierra Forest" Xeon CPUs with E-cores are announced for 2024. Even if they are not branded Xeon, but Atom, there already are a lot of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, e.g. Denverton Refresh, Snow Ridge, Parker Ridge and the recently launched Arizona Beach.
- api 3y ago
  A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI.
  - pclmulqdq 3y ago
    Imagine if that chip also had HBM memory and fit into a PCIe slot, or maybe had direct-attached high-bandwidth networking. Now imagine Intel had that product and canceled it in 2017, and you will be living in reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
    - api 3y ago
      They’re fools not to revive that or something like it. Not only would something like 1024 cores with AVX512 be competitive with GPUs it would have the added advantage of being waaay more versatile and easier to program.
      - rowanG077 3y ago
        I actually don't think that would be easier to program. The current thread abstraction won't be efficient with 1024 cores. OpenCL is much better suited for that. But then you might as well run it on a GPU.
        moab 3y ago
        Work stealing makes it arguably much easier to program than CUDA or OpenCL.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - kimixa 3y ago
        That versatility comes at a cost though - nothing in silicon is free. It clearly couldn't compete with GPUs in their strengths, and couldn't find it's own niche, which is why it was cancelled. And I'm not sure it'll be that much easier to program - "few large cores" and "GPU waves" are now pretty well supported in the stack with mature tooling - trying to insert a new stack between the two would likely be pretty difficult as it doesn't really fit well with either established paradigm so likely needs something new to show it's benefits.
      - CyberDildonics 3y ago
        What you are talking about has literally came and went. You can probably track one down, buy it and have it in your computer in a few days.
      - jgtrosh 3y ago
        I won a Xeon Phi programming manual at an Intel talk; I can assure you that even though it's easy to program, it is absolutely not easy to optimise. The amount of compiler+profiler+cilk+… tooling Intel had to provide was impressive.
      - KolenCh 3y ago
        It is not easy to program Xeon Phi if you want to get performance. It is easy to run any application on it, but it is also easy to run it slower than a cheaper Xeon with much less core count. It was a big experiment, and it failed. Some of the brightest people have tried to push it to the limit. In my circle, I have never heard anyone missing Xeon Phi when it is discontinued.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI. A chip with hundreds or thousands of E-cores should be ideal for any cloud provider to offer vCPUs with a high markup. For example, a company like Hetzner sells 1vCPU services for around 4€/month. Even if they don't overprovision and allocate 1 core per 1vCPU, a single chip can potentially earn them 500€/month, which leads to a break even point at around 2 years.
    - foota 3y ago
      Wait till you see the memory bandwidth that 1 thousandth of a cpu gets you.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
They don't have a lot to brag about there. I'm on an expensive Thinkpad with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, less than a year old... no AVX512. Chip was released Apr 2022, with AVX&AVX2 but no 512. (Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story). I've been messing with SIMD optimizations recently in a datastructure library I wrote, and as tantalizing as the AVX-512 is, it'll be years before it can be used in production software on a real scale. Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable in the wild.
- leeoniya 3y ago
  > Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story as a counterpoint, i'm on a P14s Gen 2 Thinkpad (Ryzen 7 PRO 5850u) and have zero issues on EndeavourOS (Arch, KDE/Plasma). most of my time is in VSCode, SublimeMerge, Chrome, MPV. i did have to rip out the realtek (or mediatek?) M.2 wifi card and swap in an intel one tho.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support for external displays (and other things) in the latest BIOS update for my machine -- for both Windows and Linux -- and there's no way to roll back and there's not a peep from them on any kind of attempt to fix or even acknowledgement of a problem. Requires a hardware ("pinhole" not power cycle) reset every time I want to switch between external monitor use and laptop only. My bug report/forum post here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/External-USB-C-display-stopped-working-1-57-BIOS-Update-Z16-AMD-Gen-1/m-p/5228342 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/Exter... -- other people are effected. Last year they pushed out a BIOS update which caused the fan to run 100% of the time. Then a "fix" which caused it to overheat. And in-between there somewhere something was pushed that caused me to have to reformat the whole thing. Lid-open-to-awake in Linux used to simply not work 75% of the time, required a hard reset. Now it works, but there's a 5-10 second pause before display turns on (Windows or Linux) vs almost instant on the work issued laptops I've had recently (MBP M1 and some HP Z series thing, running Linux) Waste of cash. Bought this thing to be my dev workstation when I took a contract job last summer, wish I'd never done that. Software quality / support at Lenovo is a real problem.
PragmaticPulp 3y ago
> AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores. Why would they put a dig at Intel’s consumer chips in a slide deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. This doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something. Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adrian_b 3y ago
  There are many kinds of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, with up to 24 E-cores, which are branded Atom, not Xeon, and which are less known, because they are mainly intended to be integrated in various telecommunication systems, e.g. in mobile phone infrastructure. Intel server CPUs with E-cores that will use the Xeon brand, because they will have much more cores (6-times more, i.e. 144 vs. 24) than the current models, are announced for 2024.
- peppermint_gum 3y ago
  >The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. Xeons with E-cores are planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Forest And even if they weren't, it would still be a cheap PR win. >Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right? All the current generation processors (Zen4) support AVX-512, both mobile and desktop. It may be confusing because AMD's numbering scheme is intentionally misleading and they sell previous gen chips with new model numbers.

Last I checked, there aren't any Xeons with E-cores. However, you're right: the most direct competitor to Bergamo seems to be Sierra Forest, a chip that will have nothing but E-cores (and no AVX-512).

adrian_b 3y ago
The Intel "Sierra Forest" Xeon CPUs with E-cores are announced for 2024. Even if they are not branded Xeon, but Atom, there already are a lot of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, e.g. Denverton Refresh, Snow Ridge, Parker Ridge and the recently launched Arizona Beach.
api 3y ago
A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Imagine if that chip also had HBM memory and fit into a PCIe slot, or maybe had direct-attached high-bandwidth networking. Now imagine Intel had that product and canceled it in 2017, and you will be living in reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
  - api 3y ago
    They’re fools not to revive that or something like it. Not only would something like 1024 cores with AVX512 be competitive with GPUs it would have the added advantage of being waaay more versatile and easier to program.
    - rowanG077 3y ago
      I actually don't think that would be easier to program. The current thread abstraction won't be efficient with 1024 cores. OpenCL is much better suited for that. But then you might as well run it on a GPU.
      - moab 3y ago
        Work stealing makes it arguably much easier to program than CUDA or OpenCL.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - kimixa 3y ago
      That versatility comes at a cost though - nothing in silicon is free. It clearly couldn't compete with GPUs in their strengths, and couldn't find it's own niche, which is why it was cancelled. And I'm not sure it'll be that much easier to program - "few large cores" and "GPU waves" are now pretty well supported in the stack with mature tooling - trying to insert a new stack between the two would likely be pretty difficult as it doesn't really fit well with either established paradigm so likely needs something new to show it's benefits.
    - CyberDildonics 3y ago
      What you are talking about has literally came and went. You can probably track one down, buy it and have it in your computer in a few days.
    - jgtrosh 3y ago
      I won a Xeon Phi programming manual at an Intel talk; I can assure you that even though it's easy to program, it is absolutely not easy to optimise. The amount of compiler+profiler+cilk+… tooling Intel had to provide was impressive.
    - KolenCh 3y ago
      It is not easy to program Xeon Phi if you want to get performance. It is easy to run any application on it, but it is also easy to run it slower than a cheaper Xeon with much less core count. It was a big experiment, and it failed. Some of the brightest people have tried to push it to the limit. In my circle, I have never heard anyone missing Xeon Phi when it is discontinued.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > A chip with hundreds or thousands of E cores and AVX512 may be competitive with GPUs for AI. A chip with hundreds or thousands of E-cores should be ideal for any cloud provider to offer vCPUs with a high markup. For example, a company like Hetzner sells 1vCPU services for around 4€/month. Even if they don't overprovision and allocate 1 core per 1vCPU, a single chip can potentially earn them 500€/month, which leads to a break even point at around 2 years.
  - foota 3y ago
    Wait till you see the memory bandwidth that 1 thousandth of a cpu gets you.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

They don't have a lot to brag about there. I'm on an expensive Thinkpad with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, less than a year old... no AVX512. Chip was released Apr 2022, with AVX&AVX2 but no 512. (Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story). I've been messing with SIMD optimizations recently in a datastructure library I wrote, and as tantalizing as the AVX-512 is, it'll be years before it can be used in production software on a real scale. Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable in the wild.

leeoniya 3y ago
> Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story as a counterpoint, i'm on a P14s Gen 2 Thinkpad (Ryzen 7 PRO 5850u) and have zero issues on EndeavourOS (Arch, KDE/Plasma). most of my time is in VSCode, SublimeMerge, Chrome, MPV. i did have to rip out the realtek (or mediatek?) M.2 wifi card and swap in an intel one tho.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support for external displays (and other things) in the latest BIOS update for my machine -- for both Windows and Linux -- and there's no way to roll back and there's not a peep from them on any kind of attempt to fix or even acknowledgement of a problem. Requires a hardware ("pinhole" not power cycle) reset every time I want to switch between external monitor use and laptop only. My bug report/forum post here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/External-USB-C-display-stopped-working-1-57-BIOS-Update-Z16-AMD-Gen-1/m-p/5228342 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/Exter... -- other people are effected. Last year they pushed out a BIOS update which caused the fan to run 100% of the time. Then a "fix" which caused it to overheat. And in-between there somewhere something was pushed that caused me to have to reformat the whole thing. Lid-open-to-awake in Linux used to simply not work 75% of the time, required a hard reset. Now it works, but there's a 5-10 second pause before display turns on (Windows or Linux) vs almost instant on the work issued laptops I've had recently (MBP M1 and some HP Z series thing, running Linux) Waste of cash. Bought this thing to be my dev workstation when I took a contract job last summer, wish I'd never done that. Software quality / support at Lenovo is a real problem.

PragmaticPulp 3y ago

> AVX-512 is still not present in the chips with E-cores. Why would they put a dig at Intel’s consumer chips in a slide deck for their server parts? The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. This doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something. Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
adrian_b 3y ago
There are many kinds of Intel server CPUs with E-cores, with up to 24 E-cores, which are branded Atom, not Xeon, and which are less known, because they are mainly intended to be integrated in various telecommunication systems, e.g. in mobile phone infrastructure. Intel server CPUs with E-cores that will use the Xeon brand, because they will have much more cores (6-times more, i.e. 144 vs. 24) than the current models, are announced for 2024.
peppermint_gum 3y ago
>The Intel Xeons don’t have E-cores. Xeons with E-cores are planned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Forest And even if they weren't, it would still be a cheap PR win. >Also, you know AMD has recent consumer chips without AVX-512, right? All the current generation processors (Zen4) support AVX-512, both mobile and desktop. It may be confusing because AMD's numbering scheme is intentionally misleading and they sell previous gen chips with new model numbers.