Energy Efficiency Features of the Intel Skylake-SP Processor and Their Impact on Performance

Research output: Contribution to conferencesPaperContributedpeer-review

Abstract

The overwhelming majority of High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and server infrastructure uses Intel x86 processors. This makes an architectural analysis of these processors relevant for a wide audience of administrators and performance engineers. In this paper, we describe the effects of hardware controlled energy efficiency features for the Intel Skylake-SP processor. Due to the prolonged micro-architecture cycles, which extend the previous Tick-Tock scheme by Intel, our findings will also be relevant for succeeding architectures. The findings of this paper include the following: C-state latencies increased significantly over the Haswell-EP processor generation. The mechanism that controls the uncore frequency has a latency of approximately 10ms and it is not possible to truly fix the uncore frequency to a specific level. The out-of-order throttling for workloads using 512 bit wide vectors also occurs at low processor frequencies. Data has a significant impact on processor power consumption which causes a large error in energy models relying only on instructions.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-8491-770X/work/141543284
Scopus 85092071134
ORCID /0009-0003-0666-4166/work/151475578
ORCID /0000-0002-5437-3887/work/154740505

Keywords

Research priority areas of TU Dresden

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • HPC, Energy Effciency