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Comment by lightedman | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather wait for Ryzen. You won't know which Skylake processor you're getting - the gimped one or the non-gimped one. AMD tends to keep their features consistent across the line.

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What do you mean by "gimped?" As in the consumer chips without AVX512 vs. the server chips with AVX512?

Yea, meanwhile AMD tends to keep the features across both desktop and server lines of CPU the same.

And the pre-release Skylake server procs seems to be gimped as it's missing a few features versus the actual official release Skylake server procs.

Depends on the workload. A compute bound vectorizable problem could be four times faster on Skylake.

Why 4 and not 2 (512/256)?

the masks on avx 512 can lead to more than a 2x improvement sometimes

Zen doesn't even have full width AVX2 (256bit) units the comparison is quite invalid.

And Ryzen isn't AMD's server product.

Naples doesn't have it either, it's the same CCX.

Does Google provide machines with AMD processors?

No, we don't provide any machines with AMD processors in Cloud, today. Fun historical fact though: the 'N' in n1 meant 'Intel'.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Any plans on doing that in the future?

Based on public talks by GCP engineers, it's very unlikely. Maybe SEV (encrypted VMs) might change that. However, the small glimpse into GCP that you get from looking at their work on KVM would suggest no.

During the Ryzen launch announcement GCP was listed on their partners, this may only be due to the availability of AMD GPU's but considering this was a CPU-specific talk I'd guess the magic 8-ball says "outlook good".

Interesting to know about the 'N'. How about g1 & f1? Any history behind those?

I came up with the naming scheme here. We picked n for Intel as I could be confused with i3/i5/i7.

Early work was done in AMD and we had an a1 series pre launch.

IIRC, g is for Google or Generic where there are no promises on architecture. And f was for fractional.

I've been out of Google for 2+ years now so reality may have drifted from that original scheme.

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