Server Processors

[gil_mo]

(First posted in Drivers & Software, then I was asked to post it here):

Hi,
We're a company that develops audio processing products, that heavily depend on Intel's Math Kernel Library (MKL) for optimizations.

We've been using MKL for a long time now, enjoying great optimization on both AMD and Intel CPUs. Now that it's time to upgrade to a newer MKL version (2021 or 2022), we're experiencing a degradation by a factor of 3 when running on AMD, while Intel processors have the same good performance as before.

It is important to mention that we used to use Intel's "secret" environment variable that overcame degradation on AMD, however this variable is no longer available with the newer MKL versions.

Is there an AMD specialist we can consult with? I assume this problem is well known around the AMD development community.

Thanks,
Gil.

[dipak]

Hi @gil_mo 

Thanks for your query. I am moving the post to the AMD Server Gurus forum which is better place for this query.

Thanks.

[gil_mo]

Hi,

Aren't there any AMD experts here to discuss this important topic?

Thanks 🙂

[santosh_zanjurne]

Hi Gil,
Have you tried AMD Toolchain products? AMD has AOCL and AOCC - AMD Optimized Libraries and Compilers. I would encourage you to try AMD AOCL library and AMD AOCC C, C++ and Fortran Compiler.
They should help you give better and reliable performance in the long run.

If you have any issues using them, toolchainsupport@amd.com is the fastest way to reach us.

Thanks,
Santosh

https://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks/
https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocl
https://developer.amd.com/amd-aocc

[gil_mo]

Dear Santosh,

Thanks for your reply!

I'm not familiar at all with the AMD libraries, and transitioning from MKL is a big project including evaluation, benchmarking, and implementing if all goes well. Since I'm dealing with tenths of products, each tailored to work specifically with MKL, I don't believe this is the shortest path to improve performance.

My question was actually to find out whether AMD can suggest a patch or any other insight to work around the slowdown. More generally, what are AMD's plans regarding this? Since many of the applications out there use MKL, the danger is that there will be a market shift towards Intel-based machines due to performance differences.

So I guess it is in AMD's interest to remove the performance hit from MKL.

Please also read Agner Fog's post on the Intel board, suggesting that the latest version had improved substantially. I haven't yet checked this claim myself, but my thinking is that AMD specialists are grabbing the newest MKL's for testing as soon as they can.

Please advise,

Thanks!

Gil.

[gil_mo]

Hi again,

Asking again: are there any AMD specialists that are measuring the performance of MKL on AMD processors and can say if there's any communication with Intel about this serious issue?

Thanks,

Gil.