“I think it might be a toss up for customers it’s going to depend on their workload and it’s going to depend on price-performance as usual, but whereas before today’s launch, it was kind of a lay-in to pick AMD, it’s not anymore. “Intel’s positioning vis-a-vis AMD is certainly better than before,” said Dan Olds, chief research officer with Intersect360 Research. According to Intel’s testing, Ice Lake outperformed Milan by 18 percent on Linpack, by 27 percent on NAMD, and by 50 percent on Monte Carlo (as already stated).Ĭoming just three weeks after AMD’s Epyc Milan launch, the Intel Ice Lake launch pits third-gen Xeon against third-gen Epyc. The slide below (which Intel shared during a media pre-briefing last week) shows HPC, cloud and AI performance comparisons for the top Ice Lake part (40-core) versus the top AMD Epyc Milan part (64-core) in two-socket configurations. Intel has had the Milan parts in-house long enough to conduct some early competitive benchmarking. “We have all the information for Rome, but we obviously are doing these comparisons to the latest competition.” “Honestly, we just got our Milan parts in about a week ago,” said Damkroger. She indicated that more optimized results will be on the way. Pointing to the 70 percent speedup for Monte Carlo simulations, gen over gen, and claiming a 50 percent improvement versus the competition (ie AMD’s 7nm Milan CPU), Damkroger said the gains are attributable to Ice Lake’s L1 and L2 cache sizes, the eight faster memory channels, and also the AVX-512 instructions. “We’re preparing NAMD to run more optimally on the upcoming Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory,” said Dave Hardy, senior research programmer, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.Īnother illustrative use case comes from financial services, a field which is beset by space and power constraints (in New York City, for example) and which uses complex in-house software.
#LINPACK BENCHMARK AVX CODE#
The slide below shows improvements on a total of 12 HPC applications, including 58 percent higher performance on the weather forecasting code WRF, 70 percent improved performance on Monte Carlo, 51 percent speed-up on OpenFoam, and 57 percent improvement on NAMD.Īt the University of Illinois’ OneAPI Center of Excellence, researchers are working to expand NAMD to support GPU architectures through the use of OneAPI’s open standards. These improvements on industry-standard benchmarking apps are reflected on application codes used in earth system modeling, financial services, manufacturing, as well as life and material science. With AVX-512 enabled, the 40-core, top-bin 8380 Platinum Xeon achieves 62 percent better performance on Linpack, over AVX2.Ĭompared with the previous-gen Cascade Lake, the Ice Lake 8380 Xeon achieves 38 percent higher performance on Linpack, 41 percent higher performance on HPCG, and 47 percent faster performance on Stream Triad, in Intel testing. The combination of AVX-512 instructions (first implemented on the now-discontinued Intel Knights Landing Phi in 2016 and on Skylake in 2017) and the 8-channels of DDR4-3200 memory are proving especially valuable for boosting HPC workloads. In addition to moving to PCIe Gen4, which provides a 2X bandwidth increase compared with Gen3, the socket to socket interconnect rates for Ice Lake have increased nearly 7.7 percent for improved bandwidth between processors. Although Speed Select was introduced on Cascade Lake, it previously only facilitated the configuring of frequency, but with Ice Lake, there is the added flexibility to dynamically adjust core count and power. Damkroger further emphasized Intel’s Speed Select Technology (SST), which enables granular control over processor frequency, core count, and power. “Having eight memory channels is key for memory bound workloads, and with the 40 cores along with AVX-512, the CPU shows great performance for a lot of workloads that are more compute bound,” she said. In an interview with HPCwire, Intel’s Vice President and General Manager of HPC Trish Damkroger highlighted the work that went into the Sunny Cove core as well as the HPC platform enhancements.
#LINPACK BENCHMARK AVX SERIES#
Optane PMem 200 is part of Intel’s datacenter portfolio targeting the new third-generation Xeon platform, along with Optane P5800X SSD, SSD D5-P5316 NAND, Intel Ethernet 800 series network adapters (offering up to 200GbE per PCIe 4.0 slot), and the company’s Agilex FPGAs. Using Intel’s Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) 200 series combined with traditional DRAM, the new Ice Lake processors support up to 6 terabytes of system memory per socket (versus 4.5 terabytes supported by Cascade Lake and Cascade Lake-Refresh).