I was thinking of the usual complaint about Intel not supporting AMD hardware that is common in HPC.
We don't know what that example was actually measuring, except apparently not the same thing for BLIS and MKL. On the basis of only that, it's not reasonable to say "just so much faster", in particular for what I care about. I have Zen2 measurements (unfortunately only in a VM) using the BLIS test/3 framework. MKL came out nearly as fast as vanilla BLIS 0.7 and OpenBLAS on serial DGEMM, less so on the rest of D level 3, and nowhere close with S, C, and Z. Similarly for one- and two-socket OpenMP. At least in that "2021" version of MKL, there's only a Zen DGEMM kernel.
Re:R, OpenMP, MKL, Disaster
by user5994461 on Sunday October 03, 2021 @12:56PM
(#28738600)
Have you set the environment variable OPENBLAS_CORETYPE to specify the CPU?
A year ago, I benchmarked a transformer network with libtorch linked against various BLAS libraries (numbers are in sentences per second, MKL with CPU detection override on AMD, 4 threads):
Ryzen 3700X - OpenBLAS: 83, BLIS: 69, AMD BLIS: 80, MKL: 119
Xeon Gold 6138 - OpenBLAS: 88, BLIS: 52, AMD BLIS: 59, MKL: 128
I guess people avoid AMD's support, because MKL is just much faster? AMD BLIS did add batch GEMM support since then. Didn't have time to try that out yet.