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Re:Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon by Remnant44 on Saturday September 07, 2024 @03:47AM (#41472235)
Hi Raph, first of all thank you for all of your contributions and writings - I've learned a ton from reading your blog!

A minor quibble amidst your good comparison above ;)

For a zen5 core, we have 16-wide SIMD with 4 pipes; 2 are FMA (2 flop), and 2 are FADD @ ~5GHZ. I math that out to 16 * 6 * 5 = 480 GFLOP/core... am I missing something?

Re:Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon by raphlinus on Saturday September 07, 2024 @10:54AM (#41474240)
Thanks for the kind words and the clarification. I'm sure you're right; I was just multiplying things together without taking into account the different capabilities of the different execution units. Hopefully that doesn't invalidate the major points I was making.
Re:Zen, CUDA, and Tensor Cores, Part I: The Silicon by adrian_b on Saturday September 07, 2024 @02:16PM (#41475409)
According to the initial reviews, it appears that when 512-bit instructions are executed at the maximum rate, this increases the power consumption enough so that the clock frequency drops to around 4 GHz for a 9950X

So a 9950X can do 256 FMA + 256 FADD for FP64 or 512 FMA + 512 FADD for FP32, per clock cycle.

Using FP32, because it can be compared with the GPUs, there are 1536 Flop per clock cycle, therefore about 6 FP32 Tflop/s @ 4 GHz for a 9950X (around 375 FP32 Gflop/s per core, but this number is irrelevant, because a single active core would go to a much higher clock frequency, probably over 5 GHz). For an application that uses only FMA, like matrix multiplication, the throughput would drop to around 4 FP32 Tflop/s or 2 FP64 Tflop/s.

The values for the FP32 throughput are similar to those of the best integrated GPUs that exist at this time. Therefore doing graphics rendering on the CPU on a 9950X might be similarly fast to doing graphics rendering on the iGPU on the best mobile CPUs. Doing graphics rendering on a 9950X can still leverage the graphics and video specific blocks contained in the anemic GPU included in 9950X, whose only problem is that it has a very small number of compute shaders, but their functions can be augmented by the strong CPU.