I have been looking for quite a while and cannot seem to find an official/conclusive figure quoting the number of single precision floating point operations/clock cycle that an Intel Xeon quadcore can complete. I have an Intel Xeon quadcore E5530 CPU.
I'm hoping to use it to calculate the maximum theoretical FLOP/s my CPU can achieve.
MAX FLOPS = (# Number of cores) * (Clock Frequency (cycles/sec) ) * (# FLOPS / cycle)
Anything pointing me in the right direction would be useful. I have found this
FLOPS per cycle for sandy-bridge and haswell SSE2/AVX/AVX2
Intel Core 2 and Nehalem:
4 DP FLOPs/cycle: 2-wide SSE2 addition + 2-wide SSE2 multiplication
8 SP FLOPs/cycle: 4-wide SSE addition + 4-wide SSE multiplication
But I'm not sure where these figures were found. Are they assuming a fused multiply add (FMAD) operation?
EDIT: Using this, in DP I calculate the correct DP arithmetic throughput cited by Intel as 38.4 GFLOP/s (cited here). For SP, I get double that, 76.8 GFLOP/s. I'm pretty sure 4 DP FLOP/cycle and 8 SP FLOP/cycle is correct, I just want confirmation of how they got the FLOPs/cycle value of 4 and 8.
Nehalem is capable of executing 4 DP or 8 SP FLOP/cycle. This is accomplished using SSE, which operates on packed floating point values, 2/register in DP and 4/register in SP. In order to achieve 4 DP FLOP/cycle or 8 SP FLOP/cycle the core has to execute 2 SSE instructions per cycle. This is accomplished by executing a MULDP and an ADDDP (or a MULSP and an ADDSP) per cycle. The reason this is possible is because Nehalem has separate execution units for SSE multiply and SSE add, and these units are pipelined so that the throughput is one multiply and one add per cycle. Multiplies are in the multiplier pipeline for 4 cycles in SP and 5 cycles in DP. Adds are in the pipeline for 3 cycles independent of SP/DP. The number of cycles in the pipeline is known as the latency. To compute peak FLOP/cycle all you need to know is the throughput. So with a throughput of 1 SSE vector instruction/cycle for both the multiplier and the adder (2 execution units) you have 2 x 2 = 4 FLOP/cycle in DP and 2 x 4 = 8 FLOP/cycle in SP. To actually sustain this peak throughput you need to consider latency (so you have at least as many independent operations in the pipeline as the depth of the pipeline) and you need to consider being able to feed the data fast enough. Nehalem has an integrated memory controller capable of very high bandwidth from memory which it can achieve if the data prefetcher correctly anticipates the access pattern of the data (sequentially loading from memory is a trivial pattern that it can anticipate). Typically there isn't enough memory bandwidth to sustain feeding all cores with data at peak FLOP/cycle, so some amount of reuse of the data from the cache is necessary in order to sustain peak FLOP/cycle.
Details on where you can find information on the number of independent execution units and their throughput and latency in cycles follows.
See page 105 8.9 Execution units of this document
http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf
It says that for Nehalem
The floating point multiplier on port 0 has a latency of 4 for single precision and 5 for double and long double precision. The throughput of the floating point multiplier is 1 operation per clock cycle, except for long double precision on Core2. The floating point adder is connected to port 1. It has a latency of 3 and is fully pipelined.
In order to get 8 SP FLOP/cycle you need 4 SP ADD/cycle and 4 SP MUL/cycle. The adder and the multiplier are on separate execution units, and dispatch out of separate ports, each can execute on 4 SP packed operands simultaneously using SSE packed (vector) instructions (4x32bit = 128bits). Both have throughput of 1 operation per clock cycle. In order to get that throughput, you need to consider the latency... how many cycles after the instruction issues before you can use the result.. so you have to issue several independent instructions to cover the latency. The multiplier in single precision has a latency of 4 and the adder of 3.
You can find these same throughput and latency numbers for Nehalem in the Intel Optimization guide, table C-15a
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.html
Related
I am confused about the theoretical maximum performance of the Intel Xeon E5-2640 v4 CPU (Boardwell-based). In this post, >800GFLOPS; in this post, about 200GFLOPS; in this post, 3.69GFLOPS per core, 147.70GFLOPS per computer. So what is the theoretical maximum performance of Intel Xeon E5-2640 v4 CPU?
Some specifications:
Processor Base Frequency = 2.4GHz;
Max turbo frequency = 3.4GHz;
IPC (instruction per cycle) = 2;
Instruction Set Extensions: AVX2, so #SIMD = 256/32 = 8;
I tried to compute the theoretical maximum FLOPS. Based on my understanding, it should be (Max turbo frequency) * (IPC) * (#SIMD), which is 3.4 * 2 * 8 = 54.4GFLOPS, is it right?
Should it be multiplied by 2 (due to the pipeline technique which makes addition and multiplication can be done in parallel)? What if additions and multiplications do not appear at the same time? (eg. if the workload only contains additions, is *2 appropriate?)
Besides, the above computation should be the maximum FLOPS per core, right?
3.4 GHz is the max single-core turbo (and also 2-core), so note that this isn't the per-core GFLOPS, it's the single-core GFLOPS.
The max all-cores turbo is 2.6 GHz on that CPU, and probably won't sustain that for long with all cores maxing out their SIMD FP execution units. That's the most power-intensive thing x86 CPUs can do. So it will likely drop back to 2.4 GHz if you actually keep all cores busy.
And yes you're missing a factor of two because FMA counts as two FP operations, and that's what you need to do to achieve the hardware's theoretical max FLOPS. FLOPS per cycle for sandy-bridge and haswell SSE2/AVX/AVX2 . (Your Broadwell is the same as Haswell for max-throughput purposes.)
If you're only using addition then only have one FLOP per SIMD element per instruction, and also only 1/clock FP instruction throughput on a v4 (Broadwell) or earlier.
Haswell / Broadwell have two fully-pipelined SIMD FMA units (on ports 0 and 1), and one fully-pipelined SIMD FP-add unit (on port 1) with lower latency than FMA.
The FP-add unit is on the same execution port as one of the FMA units, so it can start 2 FP uops per clock, up to one of which can be pure addition. (Unless you do addition x+y as fma(x, 1.0, y), trading higher latency for more throughput.)
IPC (instruction per cycle) = 2;
Nope, that's the number of FP math instructions per cycle, max, not total instructions per clock. The pipeline's narrowest point is 4 uops wide, so there's room for a bit of loop overhead and a store instruction every cycle as well as two SIMD FP operations.
But yes, 2 FP operations started per clock, if they're not both addition.
Should it be multiplied by 2 (due to the pipeline technique which makes addition and multiplication can be done in parallel)?
You're already multiplying by IPC=2 for parallel additions and multiplications.
If you mean FMA (Fused Multiply-Add), then no, that's literally doing them both as part of a single operation, not in parallel as a "pipeline technique". That's why it's called "fused".
FMA has the same latency as multiply in many CPUs, not multiply and then addition. (Although on Broadwell, FMA latency = 5 cycles, vmulpd latency = 3 cycles, vaddpd latency = 3 cycles. All are fully pipelined, with a throughput discussed in the rest of this answer, since theoretical max throughput requires arranging your calculations to not bottleneck on the latency of addition or multiplication. e.g. using multiple accumulators for a dot product or other reduction.) Anyway, point being, a hardware FMA execution unit is not terribly more complex than an FP multiplier or adder, and you shouldn't think of it as two separate operations.
If you write a*b + c in the source, a compiler can contract that into an FMA, instead of rounding the a*b to a temporary result before addition, depending on compiler options (and defaults) to allow that or not.
How to use Fused Multiply-Add (FMA) instructions with SSE/AVX
FMA3 in GCC: how to enable
Instruction Set Extensions: AVX2, so #SIMD = 256/64 = 8;
256/64 = 4, not 8. In a 32-byte (256-bit) SIMD vector, you can fit 4 double-precision elements.
Per core per clock, Haswell/Broadwell can begin up to:
two FP math instructions (FMA/MUL/ADD), up to one of which can be addition.
FMA counts as 2 FLOPs per element, MUL/ADD only count as 1 each.
on up to 32 byte wide inputs (e.g. 4 doubles or 8 floats)
This question is related Computer Organization and Architecture. i would truly appreciate some assistance
Processor A has a clock speed of 1 GHz, and takes 1 cycle for integer operations, 2 cycles for memory operations, and 4 cycles for floating point operations. Empirical data shows that programs run on Processor A typically are composed of 35% floating point operations, 30% memory operations; and 35% integer operations.
However you wish to design a new processor, Processor B, which is an improvement on Processor A. Processor B will run the same programs as Processor A. To complete your design, you are faced with two options for improving performance:
Increase the clock speed to 1.2 GHz, but memory operations take 3 cycles
Decrease the clock speed to 900 MHz, but floating point operations only take 3 cycles
Compute the speedup for both options and decide the option Processor B should take.
i have tried finding the Execution time for Processors A and B by using ICxCPIxCT. I used MIPS (Clock rate/CPIx10^6) as the IC in all cases. When i was finished with everything, the Processor B(1) was deemed the most efficient since it had the lowest CPU time(940.3x10^-9) but i'm not sure if my method was correct.
For example, a modern i7-8700k can supposedly do ~60 GFLOPS (single-precision, source) while its maximum frequency is 4.7GHz. As far as I am aware, an instruction has to take at least one cycle to complete, so how is this possible?
There are multiple factors that are all multiplied together for this large effect:
SIMD, Intel 8700k and similar processors support AVX and AVX2, which includes many instructions that operate on registers that can hold 8 floats at the same time.
multiple cores, 8700k has 6 cores.
fused multiply-add, part of AVX2, has both a multiplication and addition in the same instruction.
high throughput execution. The latency (time an individual instruction takes) is not directly important to how much computation a processor can do in a unit of time. A modern CPU such as 8700k can start executing two (independent) FMAs in the same cycle (and keep in mind these are still SIMD instructions so that represents a lot of floating point operations) even through the latency of the operation is actually 4 cycles.
Multiplying all those factors together we get: 8 * 6 * 2 * 2 * 4.3 = 825 GFLOPS (matching the stats reported here). This calculation certainly does not mean that it can actually be attained. For example the processor may downclock significantly under such a workload in order to stay within its power budget, which is what Intel has been doing at least since Haswell (though the specifics have changed and it applied to server parts). Also, most real code has significant trouble feeding that many FMAs with data. Large matrix multiplications can get close though, and for example according to these stats the 8700k reached 496.7 Gflops in their SGEMM benchmark. Possibly the 8700k's max AVX2 turbo speed on 6 cores is 2.6GHz but as far as I can find it does not have an AVX offset by default (only needed when overclocked), or that GEMM is just not that close to hitting peak FLOPS.
I've wondered about the amount of bits that a given CPU can handles and how should I manage to calculate this specific value.
I wanted to make sure that my thought and also my calculation are right.
Given that I have 64 bit CPU which feature 2.3 Ghz. The amount of bits that being handled per second should be the following :
(2.3 * 10^9) * 64
Is it that simple or I need consider any other variables?
Calculating throughput of a CPU is not as simple. Modern CPUs are pipelined and can execute multiple instructions concurrently if there are no data dependencies, yielding instructions per cycle (IPC) > 1. Some instructions may also have a higher latency than one cycle, meaning IPC can be < 1.
For some operations they might be constrained by memory bandwidth.
And then there are SIMD instructions which can process more data per instruction than the width of a single general purpose register.
http://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipelining
I was trying to verify the single precision peak performance of a reference GT200 card.
From http://www.realworldtech.com/gt200/9/, we have two facts about GT200 –
The latency of the fastest operation for an SP core is 4 cycles.
The SFU takes 4 cycles too to finish an operation.
Now, each SM has a total of 8 SPs and 2 SFUs, with each SFU having 4 FP multiply units and these SPs and SFUs can work at the same time as they are on two different ports as explained in their SM level diagrams. Each SP can perform MAD operation.
So, we are looking at 8 MAD operations and 8 MUL operations per 4 SP cycles. This gives us 16 + 8 = 24 operations per 4 SP clock cycles as MAD counts as 2 operations. Since 2 SP clock cycle counts as one shader clock, we have 24/2 = 12 operations per shader clock.
For a reference GT200 card, shader clock = 1296 MHz/s.
Thus, the single precision peak performance must be = 1296 MHz/s * 30 SM * 12 operations per shader clock = 466.560 GFLOPS
This is exactly half of the GFLOPS as reported in the specs. So where am I going wrong?
Edit: After Robert’s pointer to the CUDA Programming Guide that says 8MADs/shader clock can be performed in a GT200 SM, I would have to question how latency and throughput relate to each other in this particular SM.
There is a latency of one OP / 4 SP cycles (as pointed out earlier), thus one MAD every 4 SP cycles, right? We have 8 SPs, so it becomes 8 MADs for every 4 SP cycles in an SM.
Since 2 SP cycles form one shader cycle, so we are left with => 8MADs per 2 shader clock cycles
=> 4 MADs per shader clock.
This doesn’t match with the 8MADs/shader clock from the Programming Guide.
So, what am I doing wrong again?
Latency and throughput are not the same thing.
A cc 1.x SM can retire 8 single precision floating point MAD operations on every clock cycle.
This is the correct formula:
1296 MHz(cycle/s) * 30 SM * (8 SP/SM * 2 flop/cycle per SP + 2 SFU/SM * 4 FPU/SFU * 1 flop/cycle per FPU)
= 622080 Mflop/s + 311040 Mflop/s = 933 GFlop/s single precision
From here
EDIT: The 4-cycle latency you're referring to is the latency of a warp (i.e. 32 threads) MAD instruction, as issued to the SM, not the latency of a single MAD operation on a single SP. The FPU in each SP can generate one MAD result per clock, and there are 8 SP's in one SM, so each SM can generate 8 MAD results per clock. Since a warp (32 threads) MAD instruction requires 32 MAD results, it requires 4 total clocks to complete the warp instruction, as issued to the SPs in the SM.
The FPU in the SP can generate one new MAD result per clock. From the standpoint of instruction issue, the fundamental unit is the warp. Therefore a warp MAD instruction requires 4 clocks to complete.
EDIT2: Responding to question below.
Preface: The FPUs in the SFU are not independently schedulable. They only come into play when an instruction is scheduled to the SFUs. There are 4 FPU per SFU, and an SFU instruction requires 16 cycles (since there are 2 SFU/SM) to complete for a warp. If all 4 FPU in both SFUs were fully utilized, that would be 128 (16x4x2) flops produced during the computation of the SFU instruction, in 16 cycles. This is added to the 256 (16x2x8) total flops that could be generated by the "regular" MAD FPUs in the SM during the same time (16 cycles).
Your question seems to be interpreting the observed benchmark result and this statement in the text:
Table III also shows that the throughput for single-precision
floating point multiplication is 11.2 ops/clock, which means
that multiplication can be issued to both the SP and SFU
units. This suggests that each SFU unit is capable of doing
2 multiplications per cycle, twice the throughput of other
(more complex) instructions that map to this unit.
as an indication of either the throughput of the FPUs in the SFU or else the number of FPUs in the SFU. However you are conflating benchmark data with a theoretical number. The SFU has 4 FPU, but this does not mean that all 4 are independently schedulable for arbitrary arithmetic or instruction streams. Seeing all 4 FPU take on a new floating point instruction in a given cycle may require a specific instruction sequence that the authors haven't used.