Intel x AMD and HPC in Financial Services
What does the announcement of the new x86 Ecosystem by Intel and AMD mean for financial risk systems?
If you work on financial risk systems, then last week’s announcement by Intel and AMD probably left you somehow both jumping for joy and scratching your head in some kind of HPC version of “pat your head and rub your belly”.
The sentiment in itself is great and sorely needed but the news left me with more questions than answers. I’m sure we will find out more in due course but in the meantime if anyone from Intel or AMD wants to share any insights (under NDA) I’m all ears.
Most of our banking clients are currently Intel only for two key reasons. Firstly, they use the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) which won’t necessarily play nicely with AMD processors. Secondly the results obtained between Intel and AMD processors are not the same and for various logistical reasons this makes it hard to impossible to use both at the same time.
I’d love to know if anything in the new x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group will help unify things to help resolve either or both of the above.
In any case I suspect it will give people enough pause for thought to consider what could happen with x86 that it stops them contemplating the herculean task of porting the code to run on ARM. At least till the next time AWS comes along, cheque in hand, proposing migrating to Graviton 🤣
