Is AMD good on all instruction sets?

[Sargon]

I was told that in the past AMD used to market their 8 cores processors as better, but in practice they weren't better because they faked some instruction sets that are used to accelerate CPU processing.

Those instruction sets are intel instructions sets, and AMD supported them just for comparability. But it was an advantage or intel.

 

The question is, if this is still the case and can someone test benchmark of intel vs AMD with optimization using these instruction sets. And if those instruction sets are still relevant today.

 

https://software.intel.com/sites/landingpage/IntrinsicsGuide/#

 

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short

[Spakes]

Just one question before someone tries to do this (I can't since I don't have Ryzen system)...

Do you do something really specific that uses certain set of instructions like SSE or AVX?

[Fasauceome]

Intel's got the lead in AVX 512, and AMD has caught up or passed them in everything else. 

[mariushm]

The instruction sets are pretty much same speed with Intel on modern series like Ryzen.

 

There's an exception, AVX2 and AVX 512 where Intel processors are a bit faster but at a significant extra power consumption - in fact you have options in bioses to control how much to reduce core frequencies when using AVX512 heavy programs, in order to keep power consumption down.

The reasons why are slower is design choice... while intel may have an AVX512 "module", the AMD processor may have two AVX "256" "modules" which can be paired together to work as an AVX 512 module ... this makes the AMD chip mode versatile, as two separate cores can use those avx 256 modules to do calculations, while with the intel solution, the module can deal with only one core at a time.... i'm making this super simplified and a bit wrong, but it's easiest to explain.

It's a decision between betting on future programs using avx512 extensively, or tweaking the architecture for what's more likely (avx and avx "256" while offering avx-512 at a bit of a reduced performance)

 

 

[GoldenLag]

38 minutes ago, Fasauceome said:

Intel's got the lead in AVX 512, and AMD has caught up or passed them in everything else. 

"lead". AMD matches them in Server on that front with pure brute force iirc. (on same or lower power).  hedt is another story, no Zen 2 yet and Zen+ is definitvly slower. 

 

51 minutes ago, Sargon said:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short

why are we looking at bulldozer derivatives when its regarding Zen ?

 

i dont find any workloads where AMD instruction execution would be noticably worse other than AVX.