> 1. The mesh interconnect looks like a big loser for the smaller parts. It's a big jump up in complexity (there's an academic paper floating around which describes the guts of an early-stage version) and seems to be a power and performance drain.
Indeed surprising given that they had a few years to learn from the KNL experience.
Got a link to that paper?
> I have an upgrade budget and it looks like it'll be heading nVidia's way at this point.
Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?
The mesh is described in a bit more detail in Anandtech's previous article [1]. The figures are directly from the paper they cite [2], which is available on SciHub. I admit to not reading it in detail, only looking at the figures, but I'm amazed that with as many redrivers and repeaters as they have, they can only hit 2.4GHz on the mesh (as quoted on page 7 of this article). That thing has got to be dragging the whole architecture down.
> Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?
The particular workload I'm thinking of is Abaqus FEA. Per-core licensing is a part of that, but it's starved for double-precision (FP64) FLOPS and thus runs great on an appropriate Tesla. We have a number of K40s (which last I looked was the best workstation FP64 Tesla) for that exact reason. And they cost less than a single "Gold 6154" Xeon that the sibling comment (rightly) singles out for good single-thread performance. Throw in Abaqus's horrid per-CPU-core licensing and it's a no-brainer. Intel is just charging too much money for anything launched today to be viable in a workstation.
Ugh, per-core licensing is pita. Tell the decision-maker at your work to pay for the cores or switch to some code with more sensible pricing model. Do the alternatives (like Ansys) charge per core as well?
Unfortunately, Abaqus is required for the work we do. According to our senior ME, it has the best contact surface handling and therefore is the only software that's suitable for our types of models. (I don't have much more detail to add, as I don't actually work on our FEA stuff. I just get to advise, as the EE who knows computers inside and out.)
Indeed surprising given that they had a few years to learn from the KNL experience.
Got a link to that paper?
> I have an upgrade budget and it looks like it'll be heading nVidia's way at this point.
Just for curiosity: what workload allows you to go with NVIDIA instead of Intel (rather than AMD)?