Nvidia Calls Out Intel For Cheating In Xeon Phi vs GPU Benchmarks (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Nvidia has called out Intel for juicing its chip performance in specific benchmarks -- accusing Intel of publishing some incorrect "facts" about the performance of its long-overdue Knights Landing Xeon Phi cards. Nvidia's primary beef is with the following Intel slide, which was presented at a high performance computing conference (ISC 2016). Nvidia disputes Intel's claims that Xeon Phi provides "2.3x faster training" for neural networks and that it has "38 percent better scaling" across nodes. It looks like Intel opted for the classic using-an-old-version-of-some-benchmarking-software manoeuvre. Intel claimed that a Xeon Phi system is 2.3 times faster at training a neural network than a comparable Maxwell GPU system; Nvidia says that if Intel used an up-to-date version of the benchmark (Caffe AlexNet), the Maxwell system is actually 30 percent faster. And of course, Maxwell is Nvidia's last-gen part; the company says a comparable Pascal-based system would be 90 percent faster. On the 38-percent-better-scaling point, Nvidia says that Intel compared 32 of its new Xeon Phi servers against four-year-old Nvidia Kepler K20 servers being used in ORNL's Titan supercomputer. Nvidia states that modern GPUs, paired with a newer interconnect, scale "almost linearly up to 128 GPUs."

Comments

Re:Hmmm.

[CajunArson]

How exactly did Intel sabotage GCC or sneak in to AMD's offices and break AMD's own compiler?

Oh you mean Intel didn't go out of its way to optimize its compiler for AMD chips? Tough cookies. If AMD is so amazingly great and wants to have "fair competition" here's an idea: Tell those geniuses at AMD to go out and write their own damn compiler for their supposedly "perfect" chips.

Bitching and moaning that Intel's compiler produces perfectly functional code for AMD hardware (it did, BTW, never broke a single program running on AMD hardware) but doesn't optimize for AMD's hardware is sour grapes from a second rate company.

If AMD is so magically "innovative" like all the delusional fanboys still believe, then they can optimize their own hardware and there's no responsibility for Intel to go out and do the work for them.