In the following I will provide a frequently requested update to my former 40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data post. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Intel
OpenCL Just-In-Time (JIT) Compilation Benchmarks
The beauty of the vendor-independent standard OpenCL is that a single kernel language is sufficient to program many different architectures, ranging from dual-core CPUs over Intel's Many Integrated Cores (MIC) architecture to GPUs and even FPGAs. The kernels are just-in-time compiled during the program run, which has several advantages and disadvantages. An incomplete list is as follows:
- Advantage: Binary can be fully optimized for the underlying hardware
- Advantage: High portability
- Disadvantage: Just-in-Time compilation induces overhead
- Disadvantage: No automatic performance portability
Today's blog post is about just-in-time (jit) compilation overhead. Ideally, jit-compilation is infinitely fast. In reality, it is sufficient to keep the jit-compilation time small compared to the overall execution time. But what is 'small'?
40 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data
One of the most popular plots when it comes to technologic advancements in microprocessors in general and Moore's Law in particular is a plot entitled 35 Years of Microprocessor Trend Data based on data by M. Horowitz, F. Labonte, O. Shacham, K. Olukotun, L. Hammond, and C. Batten. Later, trend lines with some (speculative) extrapolation were added by C. Moore. One can find the plot with and without trend lines at various locations in the web (and further down). However, the plot suffers from one the sands of time: Data is only plotted up until the year 2010, missing out the last five years. Continue reading