Slashdot Mirror
AMD Gains In the TOP500 List
MojoKid writes "AMD recently announced its share of the TOP500 supercomputer list has grown 15 percent in the past six months. The company credits industry trends, upgrade paths, and competitive pricing for the increase. Of the 68 Opteron-based systems on the list, more than half of them use the Opteron 6100 series processors. The inflection point was marked by AMD's launch of their Magny-Cours architecture more than a year ago and includes the twelve-core Opteron 6180 SE at 2.5GHz at one end and two low-power parts at the other. Magny-Cours adoption is important. Companies typically don't upgrade HPC clusters with new CPUs, but AMD is billing their next-gen Interlagos architecture as a drop-in option for Magny-Cours. As such, it'll offer up to 2x the cores as well as equal-to or faster clock speeds."
This is newsworthy because it's a new cache of ammunition for the fanboys. And since this is slashdot, we're basically at ground zero of the thermonuclear flame war.
funny, whats more news worthy is that a SPARC chip reached the top. That hasn't happened in like a decade has it? (i haven't checked it in a while)
That's hardly a "random list". And this is a site about technology. Do you think it would be irrelevant for a site about gaming consoles to mention that the Kinect increased the Xbox's share of exercise games (or whatever) ?
Supercomputing designs are a rather good real-world benchmark of CPUs, because they take into account cost, density, ease of deployment, etc..
More interesting than the share of the top 500 list, though, is the fact that AMD holds the #3 spot, ahead of Intel (whose first system comes in at #4) and both are behind a GPU-based system (using Nvidia Tesla chips, at #2). This is probably a good indicator of things to come, and explains why AMD is betting so heavily on integrating the GPU into its overall system architecture, and why Intel has finally started serious work on GPUs.
#1, by the way, is held by a SPARC system.
It's not standard SPARC. The VIIIfx's commercial-workload performance would probably be pretty bad - the cores themselves are more or less identical to the existing VII cores, which have less than impressive performance. The VIIIfx derives its HPC performance, which is admittedly good, from some extensions (called HPC-ACE) that are not part of the normal SPARC instruction set. In a lot of ways, the VIIIfx is closer to a vector processor than a conventional SPARC chip. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it is certainly not a general-purpose processor.
The top500 site has its own take on highlights:
http://www.top500.org/lists/2011/06/press-release
- The two Chinese systems at No. 2 and No. 4 and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5 are all using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation, and a total of 19 systems on the list are using GPU technology.
- China keeps increasing its number of systems and is now up to 62, making it clearly the No. 2 country as a user of HPC, ahead of Germany, UK, Japan and France.
- Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (77.4 percent) of TOP500 systems. Intel’s Westmere processors increased their presence in the list strongly with 169 systems, compared with 56 in the last list.
- Quad-core processors are used in 46.2 percent of the systems, while already 42.4 percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
- Cray defended the No. 2 spot in market share by total against Fujitsu, but IBM stays well ahead of either. Cray’s XT system series remains very popular for big research customers, with three systems in the TOP 10 (one new and two previously listed).
In my opinion, the newest & most important trend in high performance computing is the advent of accelerators like GPUs.
The supercomputer I use daily is one of these new AMD based ones in the TOP500. It is a sweet machine. My software (custom engineering simulation written in C++) scales perfectly on it all the way out to over 10,000 cores.
The memory architecture is really excellent as well. With our old Intel based cluster we wouldn't load up every core on the node because of memory contention. But hyper-transport with NUMA completely negates the need to do that. We routinely fully load the nodes on the new machine without any trouble at all.
If AMD keeps it up they are going to find a lot of business in the high-end computing segment.
What is there to fight about?
A valid question! We know nothing about them, their language, their history or what they look like. But we can assume this. They stand for everything we don't stand for. Also they told me you guys look like dorks.
I think Intel, with its Larrabee thingy (now Knights Ferry?) will come to dominate the lists even more, in the short term. But honestly, who wants it?
People (like, 99% of people) want a reasonable CPU, and maybe a GPU for games. Most researchers want fast cores (parallel problems are hard), or vector processing (Matlab, Scipy, Mathematica etc take the pain out of distributing the workload), or distributed systems; in that order.
So normal people will want Fusion for its cheap GPU, and researchers will want it because it's actually easier to program.
AMD might have a bright medium-term future.
Well I'd say its also news as many of the guys here are in charge of purchases and this shows AMD still has some competitive server offerings, and as someone who remembers what it was like when there was only Intel (crazy ass pricing, lousy chips, insane motherboard costs, etc) having competition is VERY important!
I'd add these gains were done in spite of Intel doing everything but setting the AMD factories on fire trying to kill AMD. They rigged their compiler (and still are BTW) to put out shit code if it runs on an AMD CPU, they bribed the OEMs so much that there were several quarters where the ONLY profits Dell saw were Intel kickbacks, and Toshiba said their kickbacks were so generous they were "like cocaine" to the OEMs.
So I'd say that AMD making gains despite Intel doing everything but breaking their employee's kneecaps just shows they still have some competitive spirit. I personally have switched my shop to AMD only after finding out about the bribery and compiler rigging and my customers couldn't be happier. Their netbooks and laptops all have smooth video and are easy to hook to a TV via HDMI thanks to the Radeon IGPs, their desktops are likewise great with smooth 1080p video and hardware acceleration of all the major formats as well as hardware transcoding, their triples and quads make a great centerpiece for a good cheap media box or HTPC, all in all they make a great consumer box that will do all your average person will ever want to do at a price they can easily afford without breaking the bank.
So I'm personally glad for TFA, as it shows me they have competitive server chips to go with their excellent desktop and notebook lines. And frankly you should be happy too as real free market competition is good for everyone. or do you honestly think Intel would have a chip that costs less than $1000 if it weren't for AMD?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Well, it is of interest to people who are interested in supercomputers.
People who develop software for those beasts like to know how things are changing. They may not need to know the intimate details since compilers and libraries will handle most of that, but they may want to throw together a small cluster to test emerging technologies. (This is particularly true in recent years since small clusters based upon AMD/Intel CPUs and AMD/Nvidia GPUs are within reach of individuals.)
Stockholders though couldn't care less. The number of units is too small and the prestige counts for nothing unless it translates into sales in other markets.
It's a bit more. Supercomputers push bus speeds and floating-point calculations to the limits. Much of the hardware, these days, is commodity and these two criteria are important in gaming, computer art (such as rendering). The former is also important in embedded computing (such as phones) since data streaming is limited by maximum sustained bus speed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"Any proof of these claims of compiler tampering?"
This is a well known issue with the intel compiler which has been fixed since. The story is told on wikipedia in the criticism section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler
The problem is so well known, that people wrote software to patch the code produced by the intel compiler to make it work properly on AMD processors such as http://code.google.com/p/patch-authenticamd/
"So why would you be using an intel compiler on AMD cpus?"
One of the interest in using the x86 instruction set is to be binary compatible so that you can use the code generated by any compiler. The intel compiler is a very good compiler, why not use it ? VIA also produces x86 processors you can use the binaries generated by the intel compiler on it. These technologies are designed to be compatible.
"Does AMD not write one?"
AMD contributes to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open64 and to GCC.
"Your third paragraph reads like an advertisement,"
I agree on that one.
I'm glad AMD is around, but seriously you don't need to exaggerate things to make a point, especially when the exaggeration is obviously false.
Yes, Intel would have chips that cost less than $1000 if AMD weren't around. They had them BEFORE AMD was around, and that hasn't changed. They quite often do have their highest speed desktop processor right around the $1000 price, with another running at 90% of it's speed at $600, and continuing down the line. I don't suspect that will be changing any time soon.
Is we need to look at finding a new benchmark perhaps for supercomputer. Maybe two or three different kinds, depending on the kinds of thing you want.
The reason is that while GPUs are great, they are limited. We don't use them for everything for good reason. So if you have the kind of problem GPUs are good at, and linpack happens to be one of them these days, then wonderful. They are a great way to go in terms of performance/dollar and performance/watt. However if you don't, then they are not useful and you need to use CPUs.
Thus there are reasons to have the "slower" CPU based supercomputers because for some things, they are not slower at all.
For example one problem linpack has is it doesn't test interconnect speed very well. You can break the problem down in to small pieces and run it on the nodes quite well. Now that's wonderful, but not all problems are like that. Some do heavy cross node memory access and linpack doesn't show that.
That is an area GPUs fall down in. For example a Tesla M2090 has 177GB/sec of memory bandwidth to its onboard 6GB of RAM. Nice. However it only has 8GB/sec of bandwidth back to any system memory since it is on a PCIe 2.1 16x slot and that is all the bandwidth that has. Well that means things slow down a TON if you have to go off of the included RAM, never mind to RAM in another system.
So for some things, and linpack is one, that you can divide down and not have a ton of access between nodes, then wonderful, the GPUs are good. But we should have a benchmark that tests other situations too. Part of the reason why someone may buy a supercomputer instead of just a cluster is the need for high interconnect speed.
My biggiest issue is I am VERY VERY impatient when it comes to computers and I can't find anything from AMD that even comes CLOSE to my current i7 2600K @ 5Ghz. Not even a mb/cpu(s)/memory costing 3 times as much can touch this thing in most everyday things I do such as read/program/play games/photoshop/repeat. I finally, a few weeks ago, broke down and gave them another chance and built "my" 1st amd rig in like I said about 4 or so years and whilst it's fine for the money [it's a Phenom II X4 955 Black, water cooled, overclocked to 4.2Ghz with 4 gigs DDR3 @ 1333]. it's still much slower than the i5 I built around the same time [i5 750 @ 3.4Ghz, and 12 gigs DDR3 @1328 air cooled] and both cost about the same in parts, yet the i5 SMOKES the 955 even at 800Mhz less per core. So dollar for dollar you're still "faster" with intel and I Like fast. I pay well for fast. IF Amd was faster I'd be using them right now but they don't have ANYTHING to offer me except the HD 6990 I have in here but that's still ATI in my minds eye.
AMD will need to pull a major magic rabbit out thier hats on this upcoming bulldozer [which does seem to have intel worried as they are delaying the x78 chipset and subsiquent LGA2011 cpu's and boards until AMD reviels thier hand]. Smart on thier part I guess, sucks on mine cause I couldn't wait and went with the flakey p67 but hey in a couple of months I'll have a fairly cheap motherboard/cpu combo for sale :)
i just don't see it.
So why should intel have to write optimizations into their compiler for a competitor?
They don't. The issue isn't "optimizations" as one usually thinks of it, tweaking a piece of code with compiler tricks to make it run faster.
The issue is using entirely different code paths that use x86 extensions like the SSE family of instructions. These instructions, in addition to being SIMD for when the same operation is being performed on multiple pieces of data, are essentially a replacement for the old x87 floating point co-processor instructions. x87, which is old and stupid, and a right bitch for both programmers and hardware designers.
There is no processor which supports SSE where that codepath would not be faster than x87. Intel doesn't have to optimize the SSE code for AMD, and nobody is asking them to -- AMD optimizes their implementation to be fast with the code Intel (and other compilers) produce.
The problem comes when the code Intel produces specifically ignores their own spec on how to detect if these instructions are supported, and instead checks for a "GenuineIntel" vendor string, and resorts to the x87 codepath for anything else. Even though AMD chips support both the SSE instruction set and the specification for detecting it.
So that's the problem. Intel is deliberately de-optimizing competitor's parts.
Can the feature be overridden? Yeah. If you know about it, you can hack the binary to remove the check, or you could use a microcode patch to make an AMD chip return an Intel vendor string. The former is illegal if you are an end-user of a non-Free program, and the latter is illegal if you're AMD.
Is it overblown? Maybe. It's a direct and flagrant instance of Intel taking action not to boost themselves, but to harm a competitor. It costs AMD quite a bit of performance in a variety of common and popular programs, as would be expected, and which can be shown by disabling the "feature".
Personally I think that when the solution is so simple and logical -- Intel honors their own damn spec and the CPUID bits for SSE and other instruction sets -- not doing it represents just maliciousness on Intel's part, and so the level of reaction is warranted.
The enemies of Democracy are