Skylake-X also features support for AVX-512. AVX-512 is a set of new instructions that can accelerate performance for workloads like scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence (AI)/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and audio/video processing, cryptography and data compression. AVX-512 code can feature eight double precision (DP) and sixteen single precision (SP) floating point numbers within the 512-bit vectors, as well as eight 64-bit and sixteen 32-bit integers. This enables the workload to achieve more work per CPU cycle (with double the width of data registers) and helps to minimize latency and overhead (with double the number of registers), compared to AVX2. Applications must be coded to support AVX-512, however.
Versus previous-gen processors, Skylake-X also features improvements to Intel?s SpeedShift Technology. SpeedShift allows Skylake to switch P states (power states) much faster than previous-gen products. Skylake can control P states fully in hardware, whereas older processors required OS control, which can to switch P states in as fast as 1ms. It takes roughly 30ms with older processors. Though it doesn?t affect peak performance of the processor, SpeedShift can enhance responsiveness and efficiency, because the processor is able to ramp up and down more quickly.
Linking all of the cores, cache, and I/O in Skylake-X is the new mesh architecture we told you about here. In previous-generation, many-core Xeon processors, Intel has used a ring interconnect architecture to link the CPU cores, cache, memory, and various I/O controllers on the chips. As the number of cores in the processors, and memory and I/O bandwidth has increased, however, it has become increasingly more difficult to achieve peak efficiency with a ring interconnect, because a ring architecture could require data to be sent across long stretches (relatively speaking) of the ring to reach its intended destination. The new mesh architecture addresses this limitation by interconnecting on-chip elements in a more pervasive way, to ultimately increase the number of pathways and improve the efficiency.
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