CFD Online Logo CFD Online URL
www.cfd-online.com
[Sponsors]
Home > Forums > General Forums > Hardware

Intel announces "Xeon Max" CPUs with HBM2

Register Blogs Members List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Like Tree4Likes
  • 4 Post By flotus1

Reply
 
LinkBack Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old   November 10, 2022, 05:42
Default Intel announces "Xeon Max" CPUs with HBM2
  #1
Super Moderator
 
flotus1's Avatar
 
Alex
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Germany
Posts: 3,397
Rep Power: 46
flotus1 has a spectacular aura aboutflotus1 has a spectacular aura about
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-x...pids-hbm-line/

Taking a page out of Apple's playbook, Intel is calling their next generation of Xeon CPUs with HBM2e in the package "Xeon Max".
The cliff notes:
  • multiple dies/chiplets ("tiles" in Intels nomenclature)
  • up to 56 cores
  • (up to?) 64GB of HBM2e in the CPU package
  • "over 1TB/s" of HBM2 bandwidth
  • 8-channel DDR5-4800 memory (with 1DPC)
  • 2s scalability, other CPUs from this generation can do 4s and 8s
  • 3 different operation modes for HBM2, one of which runs entirely without DRAM
  • expected availability mid 2023
  • up to 350W TDP

Intel claims a ~5x increase in stream triad benchmark compared to AMDs current-gen Epyc 7773X.
These will no doubt be very interesting CPUs for CFD and FEA.
flotus1 is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 11, 2022, 03:59
Default
  #2
Super Moderator
 
flotus1's Avatar
 
Alex
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Germany
Posts: 3,397
Rep Power: 46
flotus1 has a spectacular aura aboutflotus1 has a spectacular aura about
For sure, both of them promise a generational leap in CFD performance we haven't seen in a long time.
By the way, I am aware of the peculiar timing for this announcement from Intel so far ahead of release. It's because AMD introduced their new Epyc "Genoa" lineup yesterday. But that's just what marketing has come to these days
flotus1 is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 15, 2022, 10:45
Default
  #3
Member
 
Matt
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 40
Rep Power: 14
the_phew is on a distinguished road
Of course we're all waiting to see Genoa-X benchmarked against Sapphire Rapids HBM for CFD, but with most CFD solvers now supporting GPU compute in some capacity, Sapphire Rapids HBM is probably also going to be compared against GPUs.

The LBM solver I use (PowerFLOW) licenses GPUs as 32 FP32 cores=1 CPU core, so H100 or RTX 6000 Ada GPUs may or may not be a better bang for buck vs. 56-core 'Xeon Max' CPUs. The 'Xeon Max' may come out ahead of GPUs in this licensing paradigm, at least for scenarios like ours where the per-core licensing costs FAR outstrip the hardware costs.
the_phew is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 15, 2022, 10:59
Default
  #4
Super Moderator
 
flotus1's Avatar
 
Alex
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Germany
Posts: 3,397
Rep Power: 46
flotus1 has a spectacular aura aboutflotus1 has a spectacular aura about
That's one of those things that always rubbed me the wrong way with GPU acceleration for commercial solvers. Making it artificially viable through lower license costs, instead of improving the implementation to a point where GPUs are just a no-brainer.
I'll always root for faster CPUs. I don't want to cross my fingers every time I need a slightly more "obscure" solver feature, that may or may not yet work on GPUs.
flotus1 is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 15, 2022, 11:07
Default
  #5
Member
 
Matt
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 40
Rep Power: 14
the_phew is on a distinguished road
Quote:
Originally Posted by flotus1 View Post
I'll always root for faster CPUs. I don't want to cross my fingers every time I need a slightly more "obscure" solver feature, that may or may not yet work on GPUs.
Yeah, I don't particularly want to spend my days beta testing buggy solvers that don't quite work right on GPUs. So if DS makes my decision easy by having CPUs be a slam dunk under their licensing paradigm, that's fine by me.

Besides, CPUs and GPUs are starting to converge on memory bandwidth vs. cost, with GPUs really only jumping ahead when electricity costs are paramount (we should be so lucky). But for someone that routinely runs simulations requiring 1TB+ of memory, CPUs running with system RAM are always going to be a necessity. I'm sure eight+ H100s are very fast, but they cost as much as a house to acquire. You can source a 2P server with 1TB of RAM for peanuts.
the_phew is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 16, 2022, 04:56
Default
  #6
Member
 
Erik Andresen
Join Date: Feb 2016
Location: Denmark
Posts: 35
Rep Power: 10
ErikAdr is on a distinguished road
Most Milan CPUs has a memory bandwidth of 205 GB/s and that has increased to 461 GB/s for Genova. A huge step up!

A bandwidth of 1 TB/s is about 2,2 times that of Genova. It will be interesting to see some prices on Intels Xeon Max with HBM2e. If prices for the HBM2 CPUs are not too high, then both Intel and AMD have made some very interesting CPUs for CFD calculations.
ErikAdr is offline   Reply With Quote

Old   November 16, 2022, 11:09
Default
  #7
Member
 
Matt
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 40
Rep Power: 14
the_phew is on a distinguished road
Quote:
Originally Posted by ErikAdr View Post
Most Milan CPUs has a memory bandwidth of 205 GB/s and that has increased to 461 GB/s for Genova. A huge step up!

A bandwidth of 1 TB/s is about 2,2 times that of Genova. It will be interesting to see some prices on Intels Xeon Max with HBM2e. If prices for the HBM2 CPUs are not too high, then both Intel and AMD have made some very interesting CPUs for CFD calculations.
It's a simplification, but I think of the memory subsystem as 'feeding' the cores. For CFD, the rule of thumb up to now was that cores would start to go a bit hungry if you couldn't 'feed' them with ~8 GB/s or so of memory bandwidth per core (meaning you'd get nonlinear scaling if you dropped below that). HBM2e will 'feed' the top Xeon Max with ~18 GB/s per core, which may actually be more memory bandwidth than the cores can make use of.

With Genoa, you're looking at:
32-core=14.4 GB/s per core (not too far off the 56-core Xeon Max CPU)
48-core=9.6 GB/s per core
64-core=7.2 GB/s per core
96-core=4.8 GB/s per core

So I expect you'll probably get linear speedup up to around 48 or 64 cores.

Obviously, there are other major factors in play (latency, cache, IPC, clocks, etc.) But back-of-the-envelope calcs indicate that the 64-core Genoa part will likely outpace the 56-core Xeon Max part (at a much lower cost), and Genoa-X (with all that 3D cache) may obliterate Xeon Max.

We're still at least 6 months away from Genoa-X, but I do find it curious that leaks so far have the Genoa-X lineup skipping from 32 straight to 96 cores. I hope they actually include 48 and/or 64-core Genoa-X CPUs, as those should be optimal for CFD (at least with per-core licensing).
the_phew is offline   Reply With Quote

Reply

Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Trackbacks are Off
Pingbacks are On
Refbacks are On


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
OpenFOAM benchmarks on various hardware eric Hardware 762 Today 08:35
Comparison between Intel CPUs Xeon E5-2643 v4 and Intel i7 5820K mechy Hardware 11 August 17, 2016 04:47
[OpenFOAM] Color display problem to view OpenFOAM results. Sargam05 ParaView 16 May 11, 2013 01:10
CFX11 + Fortran compiler ? Mohan CFX 20 March 30, 2011 19:56
Fluent benchmakrs on new Intel CPUs cfdmystic FLUENT 1 February 15, 2008 07:28


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 11:52.