Intel QAT Adapted For Zstd To Provide Big Performance/Efficiency Wins

[ms178]

Servethehome had a great take on these accelerators on Sapphire Rapids and the general approach. tl,dr: AMD might beat them at this game, their accelerators will be spread over the whole spectrum of CPUs (and not just the server parts or worse, even specific server parts and thus hampering adoption), making it a larger target for software developers to care about to make use of them eventually. Let's wait and see if Intel will be more clever over time and spread some of these accelerators down their whole CPU product stack in the future.

[numacross]

There are several Xeon Scalable SKUs which may meet your requirements, if you don't need the high TurboBoost frequencies. See e.g. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us...,232390,233418

You're kind of proving bezirg's point. Sapphire Rapids has been segmented into incompatible server and workstation areas. You can't put a Xeon Scalable into a Xeon Workstation motherboard despite them using the same socket.

AVX segmentation will be significantly reduced when AVX10 becomes available.

Will it really? There's still a split between 256- and 512-bit capabilities.

ECC segmentation is already reduced, many Raptor Lake SKUs (e.g. i5-13600) support ECC already.

Only on workstation W680 motherboards, again an artificial limitation since the memory controllers are on the CPU.

[Quaternions]

I'm interested to see if this can benefit zram and zswap.

[microcode]

Cool feature, and zstd in the browser is finally moving in all three significant upstreams. gzip is mostly fine, but zstd has an advantage in decompression speed and compression rate at the same time, so I think it is well suited as a transfer encoding in web applications.

[CommunityMember]

I wish Intel would stop with this market segmentation already]

As far as I know. you can choose to select the top end processors if you want the top end feature sets.

If what you really want is all the bells and whistles at a cheaper price point, well, be explicit (and be prepared to be disappointed). I am still waiting for a Ferrari SF90 for $30K.

[Anux]

If what you really want is all the bells and whistles at a cheaper price point, well, be explicit (and be prepared to be disappointed)

Or buy AMD and get all features with the cheapest SKU. Yes they also have some segmentation but mostly if your hardware supports it, it will not get disabled on purpose.

[JGC_]

QAT is also implemented on Atom C3000 series. These CPUs aren't very powerful, so speeding things up by utilizing the integrated QAT engine is useful.

[transwarp]

As far as I know. you can choose to select the top end processors if you want the top end feature sets.

If what you really want is all the bells and whistles at a cheaper price point, well, be explicit (and be prepared to be disappointed). I am still waiting for a Ferrari SF90 for $30K.

The problem with Intel is (used to be? the reputation sticks) their product x feature matrix is dense. Instead of more expensive or newer chips having more features or instructions, they each have subsets. As a customer I expect higher cost in the same product family to get me strictly more, not an idiosyncratic tradeoff.

It basically seemed like they made custom chips with the specific features various big customers wanted to ship and then labeled them as a coherent product line.