Intel Brings IBM POWER CPU Support To Their Deep Neural Network Library

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Brings IBM POWER CPU Support To Their Deep Neural Network Library

Besides the code itself to Intel's oneAPI being open-source, the company is being surprisingly open about its support even for areas of usage outside of x86_64 CPUs...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-oneDNN-POWER-CPU

[wswartzendruber]

The Intel 11900K, based on POWER9.

[CommunityMember]

.... the company is being surprisingly open about its support ....

This really should not be surprising. If oneAPI is to be successful, it needs to be cross platform, and Intel wishes oneAPI to be successful. If oneAPI is, indeed, successful, the other companies will no doubt eventually contribute enhancements to optimize for their platforms as it will be in their best interest (just like companies contribute to other projects that their customers wish to use).

[Tomin]

They are adding it just so that they can benchmark across all systems and brag how their's is faster although it's just better optimized. 😉

Seriously though I don't think Intel is going to spend much time optimizing aarch64 or POWER code. IBM and other vendors will have to do it themselves. Kind of forced too if they are looking bad on benchmarks. I wouldn't even be surprised since that'd be Intel being Intel as usual.

[microcode]

If they can resist the urge not to put enough effort into making it usable on their competitors' devices, it has a fighting chance; and may save their bacon as they expand their GPU business.

[tildearrow]

The Intel 11900K, based on POWER9.

Huge backlash as everyone discovers their x86 apps run much slower, worse than after Meltdown or LVI.

Intel goes bankrupt. AMD acquires the x86 property and wins.

[edwaleni]

IBM has a healthy customer base of POWER9 users that either ordered the NVidia GPU compute module or are using FCPGA's in a hybrid configuration using the Witherspoon platform. So its makes sense Intel is adding PPC64 support to their NN libs.

[tajjada]

Looks like Intel is coming to terms with the fact that their CPUs aren't very competitive in this day and age. Better focus on GPUs, software, and their platform features, and support other CPU architectures.