Sizing Up Compute Engines For HPC Work At 64-Bit Precision
TheNextPlatform, Friday, February 21st, 2025
If you want a CPU that has the floating point performance of a GPU, all you have to do is wait six or so years and the CPU roadmaps can catch up.
This seems like a long time to wait, which is why so many HPC centers made the leap to GPUs from CPUs starting a decade and a half ago, laying the groundwork - however unintentionally - for the massive expansion of AI on GPU compute engines.
In many ways, an X86 CPU turned into a general purpose serial compute engine with some parallel tendencies, with a healthy mix of integer and vector math capabilities and now, at least with some Intel and AMD CPUs, also accelerators for specific functions like encryption and hashing as well as matrix math engines, at least in the case of the past three generations of Xeon processors (which we now call 'Sapphire Rapids' Xeon 4, 'Emarald Rapids' Xeon 5, and 'Granite Rapids' Xeon 6). AMD was expected to add matrix engines at some point into the Epyc processors, but has thus far resisted. Arm CPU designers may eventually follow suit.