Numerical Computing Performance of 3 Intel 8-core CPUs – i9 9900K vs i7 9800X vs Xeon 2145W

In this post I’ll take a brief look at the numerical computing performance of three very capable 8-core processors — i9 9900K, i9 9800X and Xeon 2145W All three are great CPU’s but there are some significant differences that can cause confusion. I’ll discuss these differences and see how the processors stack up when running Linpack and NAMD molecular dynamics simulations.

Intel CPU flaw kernel patch effects – GPU compute Tensorflow Caffe and LMDB database creation

The Intel CPU flaw and the Meltdown and Spectre security exploits are causing a lot of concern. There is a possibility of application slowdown from the kernel patches to mitigate the exploits. This slowdown concern is a concern for GPU accelerated application because of the systems calls they require for moving data between CPU and GPU memory space. I did some testing on a couple of large Tensorflow and Caffe machine learning jobs along with the creation of a LMDA database from 1.3 million images.

Intel vs NVIDIA, IBM, Mellanox, AMD and everybody!

The next 18 months are going to see more shakeup and factioning in the computing world than we have seen in over a decade. Intel is pulling more and more of the compute architecture onto a single piece of silicon and tightly integrating the whole hardware stack. That’s good and bad. It may let them achieve better performance. However, this is going to leave users with a choice of “all Intel” or something else entirely. And, the “something else” is starting to seriously take shape.

Xeon Phi Developers Starter Kit

If you are thinking about getting a system for doing development work targeting the Intel Xeon Phi and you hesitated because of the additional cost of the Intel developer tools you would need then, you should get a system with the “Xeon Phi developers starter kit”. The savings on the Intel tools can completely offset the cost of the base system. It’s a serious bargain!