Google confirms that they are using Skylake Xeon CPUs which support AVX-512

Google has confirmed that they are now using Intel’s upcoming Skylake Xeon CPUs, which come with support for AVX-512 workloads for increased floating point performance.

Current generation Intel desktop and server CPUs only support AVX 256-bit workloads, with the only product to support AVX-512 to date being Intel’s Knights Landing/Xeon Phi co-processor. AVX 512 effectively doubles the floating point performance of the CPU, making it much more suitable for certain workloads, especially when it comes to AI, financial calculations and medical computing. 

One thing worth noting is that these calculations have been moving to GPUs in recent years, making these new CPUs a great change to combat Nvidia’s Quadro GPUs, this new collaboration with Google coming not long before the launch of AMD’s new Naples server platform. It is clear that this move from Intel is intended to be a one-two punch to combat both of their competitors in the server market in one single swoop. 

Below is a comment from Intel’s Executive Vice President and GM of the Data Center Group, Diane Bryant, regarding their partnership with google on their Cloud computing platform. 

 

     Google and Intel have had a long standing engineering partnership working on Data Center innovation.

We’re happy to see the latest Intel Xeon technology now available on Google Cloud Infrastructure.

This technology delivers significant enhancements for compute-intensive workloads, efficiently accelerating data analytics that businesses depend on for operations and growth.

 

 

In recent years Intel has had an easy time in the server market, with little to no competition. Now with AMD coming back into the picture with Naples and both AMD and Nvidia looking to move certain datasets over to GPU-based Compute models it is clear that Intel will finally need to fight to maintain their market dominance.  

 

You can join the discussion on Intel’s Skylake Xeon CPUs supporting AVX-512 compute on the OC3D Forums.