An introduction to NPU hardware and its growing presence outside of mobile computing devices.

An introduction to NPU hardware and its growing presence outside of mobile computing devices.
The performance improvement with the new Zen4 TrPRO over the Zen3 TrPRO is very impressive!
My first recommendation for a Scientific and Engineering workstation CPU would now be the AMD Zen4 architecture as either Zen4 Threadripper PRO or Zen4 EPYC for multi-socket systems.
I was prompted to do some testing by a commenter on one of my recent posts. They had concerns about problems with dual NVIDIA RTX4090s on AMD Threadripper Pro platforms. I ran some applications to reproduce the problems reported above and tried to dig deeper into the issues with more extensive testing. The included table below tells all!
This post is a first-look at performance of the Ryzen7 7950x CPU using the latest AMD compiler release with support for Zen4 arch including AVX512 vector instructions. Performance is tested using the HPC standard benchmarks, HPL (High Performance Linpack), HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient) and the newer HPC Top500 benchmark, HPL-MxP (formerly HPL-AI).
AMD has recently released version 4.0 of their AOCC compiler which includes support for AVX512 on the Zen4 architecture. This post details building a Docker image containing the Spack package manager/build system together with AMD AOCCv4.0.0 compilers. This will be used as the build image for multi-stage Dockerfiles that will be used to compile scientific applications and benchmarks with targeted Zen3/4 optimizations. It is the first step in that process.
This post presents scientific application performance testing on the new AMD Ryzen 7950X. I am impressed! Seven applications that are heavy parallel numerical compute workloads were tested. The 7950X outperformed the Ryzen 5950X by as much as 25-40%. For some of the applications it provided nearly 50% of the performance of the much larger and more expensive Threadripper Pro 5995WX 64-core processor. That’s remarkable for a $700 CPU! The Ryzen 7950X is not in the same platform class as the Tr Pro but it is a respectable, budget friendly, numerical computing processor.
We’ve been curious about the performance of WSL for scientific applications and decided to do a few relevant benchmarks. This is also a teaser for some hardware-specific optimized application containerization that I’ve been working on!
Threadripper Pro! AMD has released the long awaited Threadripper Pro CPUs. I was able to spend a (long) day (and night) running compute performance testing on the flagship 64-core TR Pro 3995WX. In this post I’ve got some HPC workload benchmark results from putting this excellent CPU through its compute paces.
On March 19, 2020 I did a webinar titled,
“AMD Threadripper 3rd Gen HPC Parallel Performance and Scaling ++(Xeon 3265W and EPYC 7742)”
The “++(Xeon 3265W and EPYC 7742)” part of that title was added after we had scheduled the webinar. It made the presentation a lot more interesting than the original Threadripper only title! This is a follow up post with the charts and plots of testing results presented in that webinar.
Is 32-cores enough? I had some testing time again on an AMD Threadripper 32-core 3970x and thought it would be interesting to compare that to the 64-core 3990x. In this post I take a comparative look at parallel performance and scaling for HPL Linpack, Python numpy and the NAMD molecular dynamics program.