Running on Intel? What’s Comes Next?
Are you stuck using only Intel CPUs? Are you wondering what your HPC roadmap looks like over the next few years with all the talk of Intel’s demise?
Whether you’re operating your own hardware on premises or renting in the cloud if you have been limited to Intel CPUs till now, you’re no doubt wondering what to do next.
Sure, you have Intel’s latest gen 6 CPUs and that should tide you over for a while. Microsoft Azure just made their new Dv6/Ev6 VMs based on those CPUs Generally Available last week too, so you have a short-term solution. (We’re busy running COREx benchmarks on those if you’re interested).
But what then?
Jump into bed with AMD instead? Take a bet on ARM? Check out Tenstorrent and RISC-V?
Personally, I believe the future of HPC is heterogenous.
How true that is for your own use case though will vary massively. If you are currently bound to Intel, chances are that’s not a trivial lock in. All too often it’s not simply a technical problem but also a logistical one. Swapping out Intel MKL for OpenBLAS or AOCL might seem daunting but it’s a finite problem.
Unwinding decades of assumptions of a single CPU architecture within not only your code but also your CI/CD pipelines, test processes and regulatory frameworks and sign offs. That’s where the fun starts!
It's not impossible though. And you may find there is more help at hand than you would have expected.
Worst case you should at least have a way to benchmark your own workloads to calculate performance adjusted costs and determine a CPU architecture/vendor to move to.
Need some pointers? Give me a shout ☎️
