The new Intel core-i9 and core-i7 “enthusiast” “X”, Skylake-X processors and the single socket Xeon Skylake-W (Workstation) processors seem nearly identical. I’ll discuss the differences and make my recommendation on which to use.
Intel Scalable Processors Xeon Skylake-SP (Purley) Buyers Guide
Intel Purley platform, Skylake-SP, Xeon “Scalable” processors (Platinum, Gold, Sliver, Bronze) are here. All 58 of them! Hopefully this post will help you to decide which of these (excellent) processors may be of use for your applications. I trim the list do to just a few of my favorites and break them down by use-case.
ARM for Supercomputing a view from SC17
ARM for HPC? Supercomputers using ARM processors? Yes! I was at SC17 last week and ARM was a hot topic. There are new ARM processor designs that are fully competitive with Intel and AMD CPU’s for high performance computing.
Skylake-X 7800X vs Coffee Lake 8700K for compute (AVX512 vs AVX2) Linpack benchmark
Which Intel CPU is for heavy numerical compute workloads, Skylake-X core i7 7800X or Coffee-Lake core i7 8700K? They are priced nearly the same. The 8700K has high core clock frequencies and good power management but the 7800X has AVX-512. I show you which one comes out on top using an Intel optimized Linpack benchmark.
Intel Core-i9 7900X and 7980XE Skylake-X Linux Linpack Performance
Intel Core-i9 7900X and 7980XE are very good desktop processors for mathematical computing workloads. This post is a short listing of results for the Linpack benchmark which is still my personal favorite CPU performance metric.
TitanXp vs GTX1080Ti for Machine Learning
NVIDIA has released the Titan Xp which is an update to the Titan X Pascal (they both use the Pascal GPU core). They also recently released the GTX1080Ti which proved to be every bit as good at the Titan X Pascal but at a much lower price. The new Titan Xp does offer better performance and is currently their fastest GeForce card. How much faster? I decided to find out by running a large Deep Learning image classification job to see how it performs for GPU accelerated Machine Learning.
NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti Performance for Machine Learning — as Good as TitanX?
How good is the NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti for CUDA accelerated Machine Learning workloads? About the same as the TitanX! I ran a Deep Neural Network training calculation on a million image dataset using both the new GTX 1080Ti and a Titan X Pascal GPU and got very similar runtimes.
NVIDIA Quadro GP100 Tesla P100 power on your desktop
NVIDIA has released the Quadro GP100 bringing Tesla P100 Pascal performance to your desktop. This new card gives you the compute performance of the NVIDIA Tesla P100 together with Quadro display capability. That means full double precision floating point capability of the P100 and NVLINK for multiple cards.
PCIe X16 vs X8 for GPUs when running cuDNN and Caffe
Does PCIe X16 give better performance than X8 for training models with Caffe when using cuDNN? Yes, but not by much!
Kabylake vs Skylake for compute on Linux — Linpack on Ubuntu 1610
OK, Intel Core-i7 7th gen Kabylake is out. Of course the first thing I want to do is drop a Core i7 7700K in a new Z270 based motherboard, install Linux and run a Linpack benchmark. You know, GFLOP/s and all that. We installed Ubuntu 1610 with a recent release of Intel MKL and fired up a few Linpack job runs. Read on for the not-so dramatic results.
