[Beowulf] AMD and AVX512

[John Hearns]

Regarding benchmarking real world codes on AMD , every year Martyn Guest
presents a comprehensive set of benchmark studies to the UK Computing
Insights Conference.
I suggest a Sunday afternoon with the beverage of your choice is a good
time to settle down and take time to read these or watch the presentation.

2019
https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/SiteAssets/Pages/CIUK-2019-Presentations/Martyn_Guest.pdf


2020 Video session
https://ukri.zoom.us/rec/share/ajvsxdJ8RM1wzpJtnlcypw4OyrZ9J27nqsfAG7eW49Ehq_Z5igat_7gj21Ge8gWu.78Cd9I1DNIjVViPV?startTime=1607008552000

Skylake / Cascade Lake / AMD Rome

The slides for 2020 do exist - as I remember all the slides from all talks
are grouped together, but I cannot find them.
Watch the video - it is an excellent presentation.


















On Sat, 19 Jun 2021 at 16:49, Gerald Henriksen <ghenriks at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 13:15:40 -0400, you wrote:
>
> >The answer given, and I'm
> >not making this up, is that AMD listens to their users and gives the
> >users what they want, and right now they're not hearing any demand for
> >AVX512.
> >
> >Personally, I call BS on that one. I can't imagine anyone in the HPC
> >community saying "we'd like processors that offer only 1/2 the floating
> >point performance of Intel processors".
>
> I suspect that is marketing speak, which roughly translates to not
> that no one has asked for it, but rather requests haven't reached a
> threshold where the requests are viewed as significant enough.
>
> > Sure, AMD can offer more cores,
> >but with only AVX2, you'd need twice as many cores as Intel processors,
> >all other things being equal.
>
> But of course all other things aren't equal.
>
> AVX512 is a mess.
>
> Look at the Wikipedia page(*) and note that AVX512 means different
> things depending on the processor implementing it.
>
> So what does the poor software developer target?
>
> Or that it can for heat reasons cause CPU frequency reductions,
> meaning real world performance may not match theoritical - thus easier
> to just go with GPU's.
>
> The result is that most of the world is quite happily (at least for
> now) ignoring AVX512 and going with GPU's as necessary - particularly
> given the convenient libraries that Nvidia offers.
>
> > I compared a server with dual AMD EPYC >7H12 processors (128)
> > quad Intel Xeon 8268 >processors (96 cores).
>
> > From what I've heard, the AMD processors run much hotter than the Intel
> >processors, too, so I imagine a FLOPS/Watt comparison would be even less
> >favorable to AMD.
>
> Spec sheets would indicate AMD runs hotter, but then again you
> benchmarked twice as many Intel processors.
>
> So, per spec sheets for you processors above:
>
> AMD - 280W - 2 processors means system 560W
> Intel - 205W - 4 processors means system 820W
>
> (and then you also need to factor in purchase price).
>
> >An argument can be made that for calculations that lend themselves to
> >vectorization should be done on GPUs, instead of the main processors but
> >the last time I checked, GPU jobs are still memory is limited, and
> >moving data in and out of GPU memory can still take time, so I can see
> >situations where for large amounts of data using CPUs would be preferred
> >over GPUs.
>
> AMD's latest chips support PCI 4 while Intel is still stuck on PCI 3,
> which may or may not mean a difference.
>
> But what despite all of the above and the other replies, it is AMD who
> has been winning the HPC contracts of late, not Intel.
>
> * - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions
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