I've been benchmarking these against Haswell and Broadwells. Despite being 300 MHz slower, we're getting between 5 and 45% faster benchmarks on linear algebra functions that we run a lot, even without doing much work to tailor to AVX512 instructions yet.
The cache is also a whopping 56 MB.
It's been awesome to see our Skylakes rolling in over the past several weeks. I personally have been waiting nearly 10 years for AVX-512 ever since playing with LRBni.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (and helped a bit in our Skylake work).
There are a few threads asking about various features (SGX, TSX, etc.) so I want to make a top-level comment: we're not ready to share more today (sorry).
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
Why is it important to offer Intel Skylake on cloud platforms? Is there some specific processor extensions present in Skylake that make them particularly compelling in a cloud environment for a particular industry or a particular set of needs?
Amazon's c5 (Skylake) series shouldn't be far behind...
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/11/coming-so...
Any sign of IPv6 support on the horizon? Slightly embarrassing in 2017...
I wonder if Skylake would offer a material improvement for our workload. We don't necessarily use AVX-512, but we do use a heck of a lot of CPU resources on the current architecture. We are a python/elixir shop.
Great job GCP team!
Did Intel actually enable the TSX extensions in Skylake? If I'm not mistaken, they shipped it in the last couple of generations but disabled it after release. (Something like that?)
It's something that I've wanted to play with for sometime. It's cool that GCE has them available as a service.
Constructive criticism:
Your calculator page is unusable on mobile due to fancy "material" form filling.
I'd rather wait for Ryzen. You won't know which Skylake processor you're getting - the gimped one or the non-gimped one. AMD tends to keep their features consistent across the line.
Whenever I want to try GCP, during signup I get stuck at "Account type Business" and the need to enter a VAT number.
It hints there's Individual Accounts, but I see no way how to set it to that?
I would be quite nice if they actually advertised the particular type of CPU core you rent, rather than some abstract unit of computation. Or at least some kind of performance baseline.
Side question: are these extensions available in the desktop (i7) parts? Wanting to test out some optimisations for some code I have.
No mention of SGX; a major Skylake feature for cloud computing. Is it enabled? Is it accessible?
Hopefully it will be the the first to offer the much cheaper AMD Ryzen/Naples, too.
>In our own internal tests, it improved application performance by up to 30%.
this post would have been interesting if they had included those tests.
Would a typical load balancer/web server running NGINX doing SSL termination see an improvement switching to Skylake?
+1 for SGX support. Would be really cool to remotely attest the software you are running in a real-world cloud.
Are these E5-skylakes?
Oh, so now I can't voice my opinion until I've been "in the business" for x amount of years? Yeah, nice try.
Another commenter already brought that issue up, but thanks for pointing it out again. I still think that it's quite silly to claim that Ryzen Rev. A may end up being a paperweight based on a mistake that took place a decade ago. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.
And from what I read, it seems like it was an extreme edge case, so the TLB error was triggered only during specific workloads. Sucks to be AMD back then.
I have worked both for AMD and for AMD's one-time largest customer. I know exactly what I am talking about. You, on the other hand, are talking out of your butthole.
A Google day is not responsive
I think it's funny that big Xeon upgrades seem to always occur approximately 8 months after big Power architecture blog posts.
Hahaha. Meanwhile I've been running 2 machines with Skylake and a combined 24 cores/48 threads, 256GB DDR4, 6x512G SSDs, unmetered 1Gbit/s public and 2,5Gbit/s internal for over half a year for a combined $150 total, in complete privacy and in full control of my hosts.. go dedicated, people.
Just for reference, since you don't choose your processor explicitly on GCP, but instead choose your zone with homogenous processors, here is their current processor/zone layout: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/regions-zones/regions-...
Since some GCP engineers are watching: Presumably we'll see some new zones to provide these processors, or will it be a limited release within existing zones? And if so, will you be moving away from homogenous zones in the future?