Skymont: Intel’s E-Cores reach for the Sky
47 points by zdw 2 days ago | 8 comments
  • xaellison 2 days ago |
    there's never a time I've been glad an article used Excel's 3D surface plot lol
  • jeffbee 2 days ago |
    So it's a huge step over Crestmont, but in practice you can't tell?
    • magicalhippo a day ago |
      Article suggests that it's due to the relatively large difference in cache architecture.

      I suspect Skymont would indeed provide double digit percentage gains given identical cache setups. However, giving Crestmont a 24 MB L3 and a 100 MHz clock speed advantage seems to be enough to cancel out Skymont’s improved architecture.

      Performance-wise, Skymont seems to be at its best in high IPC workloads with a small cache footprint. For example Skymont beats Crestmont by 20.8% in 548.exchange2, a workload that fits in Zen 4’s 32 KB L1D cache.

      However if a workload is really cache unfriendly, Skymont’s ability to pull more memory bandwidth can show through. I suspect that’s what happens in Y-Cruncher and 549.fotonik3d, as both are very memory bandwidth bound on other architectures. There, Skymont posts huge gains.

      • rbanffy a day ago |
        A long time ago, I was planning (and got some initial setup going) to use nodes in a distributed application running on a cluster of diverse architectures to benchmark performance of different types of machine to automatically look for better performance per dollar.
        • magicalhippo 21 hours ago |
          Ah, sounds fun and sounds like something BOINC[1] might be good for.

          Perhaps one could even analyze data submitted to existing projects to analyze performance on various platforms.

          [1]: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

    • wmf a day ago |
      If Arrow Lake has Skymont attached to the ring we'll see its full performance.
  • userbinator a day ago |
    The elephant in the room is how long the errata list is going to be.

    Especially after the recent debacle with overvolting its CPUs to self-destruction, I wish they'd focus on stability and correctness a bit more.

  • e3a8 16 hours ago |