Intel AVX-512 A Big Win For... JSON Parsing Performance

First up was a Xeon Platinum 8380 2P "Ice Lake" server on Ubuntu 20.04 lTS to run some quick benchmarks...

Indeed there are very significant speed-ups for JSON parsing performance thanks to this updated library employing AVX-512. In my testing on the Ice Lake Xeon server with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS it was as much as 30% faster than the AVX2 path. It's also possible on a newer distribution with newer compiler there may be even higher gains to enjoy. It will also be interesting to see what further AVX-512 optimizations are achieved in future simdjson releases.

I also ran some benchmarks on an Intel Tiger Lake notebook with Core i7 1165G7 processor.

On the Intel Tiger Lake notebook the JSON parsing performance was up to 40% faster with the new AVX-512 kernel. And then lastly a confirmation run of simdjson 2.0 without AVX-512:

Sanity testing on CPUs without AVX-512 or on the Cascade Lake X as an example for an earlier AVX-512 CPU but prone to downclocking, the simdjson 2.0 performance was unchanged as expected from simdjson 1.0.

So should you be doing massive amounts of JSON parsing on a Xeon Scalable web server or even offline analytics/processing of JSON data on Intel client hardware, with simdjson 2.0 it shows a lot of potential for AVX-512 in this area.