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Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing."
The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).
" Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps "
How much of a gain? More or less than 0.00013572067699?
For problems where you need floating point AND is not multithread friendly AND need large computing power AND is specially coded, then this will be of great use. However, most massive computing problems like this are multi-thread friendly and this will still be roughly an order of magnitude from the speeds you can get by using a GPU.
Slightly, but you haven't been keeping up on the latest hardware? My pair of Sapphire 5830's graphics cards would top off at about 435MH/s at a total system wattage of around 520W. The new Jalapeno chips from butterfly labs will do 4500 MH/s using 2 watts total system power. For comparison, my i5-2400 performed 14MH/s at 95W or so. So the Jalapeno is about 321x faster and about 47x more power efficient so combined, I believe that's 15,267.864x more efficient.
Do you really need a Mac for that? If not, it seems you're limiting your potential by having to wait for the holy artifacts to be released.
While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast HTH
Integer and floating point are separately implemented in the hardware, so an improvement to one often doesn't apply to the other. You can add integers by counting on your fingers. To do that with floating point, you have to cut your fingers into fractions of fingers - a very different process.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA3
It's common to have an accumulator like this:
X = X + (Y * Z)
To compute that in floating points, the processor normally does:
A= ROUND(Y*Z) X=ROUND(X+A)
Each ROUND() is necessary because the processor only has 64 bits in which to store the endless digits after the decimal point. FMA can fuse the multiply and the add, getting rid of one rounding step, and the intermediate variable:
X= ROUND( X + (Y*Z) )
That makes it faster. Since integers don't get rounded to the available precision, the optimization doesn't apply to integers. The above processor would do Y*Z, then +X, then round, then X=. A CPU designer can make that faster by including either a "add and multiply" circuit or a "add and round" circuit or a "round and assign' circuit. Any set of operations can be done in two clock cycles, if the maker decides to include a hardware circuit for it.
If you're doing numerics, what the fuck (if you'll pardon my French) are you doing buying Apple? I'm working on two-phase Navier-Stokes solvers myself, and I just bought a new rig consisting of 3 boxes each with a Intel Core i7 @ 3.7 GHz, 12 GB RAM, an SSD drive and a big-ass cooling system. In total that cost less than the Mac Pro with a single Core i7 @ 3.3 GHz listed in that article.You're paying 3x more than you should, and you get what extra? A shiny case? Puh-lease.
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The Core i7's are consumer-grade processors and are slower than the Xeon's the Mac Pros use
This is completely incorrect. The current Mac Pros use Nehalem based Xeons which are two generations back from the current Ivy Bridge i7s. Xeons may have differences in core count, cache and/or ECC support but their execution units are the same as their desktop equivalents. The base Mac Pro CPU is equivalent to an i7-960 with ECC support. The current Ivy Bridge i7s are a fair bit faster.
ECC memory is only marginally slower. Considering error rates and modern memory sizes, it is far past time that it became a standard feature. The extra cost would be totally insignificant if were standard, and not used as an excuse to gouge people on Xeons.
AMD already has FMA3. They also published great results. Of course nobody read it, at least I have seen mentioned it in the usual generic benchmark articles people like to refer (which does not use FMA3).