95GB/s is 24GB/s per core, at 4.8Ghz that's 40 bits per core per cycle. You would have to be doing basically nothing useful with the data to be able to get through that much bandwidth.
95GB/s is 24GB/s per core, at 4.8Ghz that's 40 bits per core per cycle. You would have to be doing basically nothing useful with the data to be able to get through that much bandwidth.
The resemblance to the behavior of GPUs is not a coincidence, but it is because the GPUs are also mostly doing array operations.
So the general rule is that the programs dominated by array operations are sensitive mostly to the memory throughput.
This can be seen in the different effect of the memory bandwidth on the SPECint and SPECfp benchmark results, where the SPECfp results are usually greatly improved when memory with a higher throughput is used, unlike the SPECint results.
This processor has two lanes over 4 P-cores. Something like an EPYC-9754 has 12 lanes over 128 cores.
However, the high memory bandwidth is intended mainly for the benefit of its relatively big GPU, which might have been able to use even higher memory throughputs.
Modern chips do face the memory wall. See eg here (though about Zen 5) where they in the same vein conclude "A loop that streams data from memory must do at least 340 AVX512 instructions for every 512-bit load from memory to not bottleneck on memory bandwidth."
Therefore to reach the maximum throughput, you must have the data in the L1 cache memory. Because L1 is not shared, the throughput of the transfers from L1 scales proportionally with the number of cores, so it can never become a bottleneck.
So the most important optimization target for the programs that use AVX-512 is to ensure that the data is already located in L1 whenever it is needed. To achieve this, one of the most important things is to use memory access patterns that will trigger the hardware prefetchers, so that they will fill the L1 cache ahead of time.
The main memory throughput is not much lower than that of the L1 cache, but the main memory is shared by all cores, so if all cores want data from the main memory at the same time, the performance can drop dramatically.
These cores cannot process 8 AVX512 instructions at once, in fact they can't do it at all, as it's disabled on consumer Intel chips.
Also, AVX instructions operate on registers, not on memory, so you cannot have more than one register being loaded at once.
If you are running at ~4 instruction per clock, to actually go ahead and saturate 40 bits per clock on 64 bit loads, you'd need 1/6 of instructions to hit main memory (not cache)!
Any number of cores with any count and any width of SIMD functional units can reach the maximum throughput, as long as it can be ensured that the data can be found in the L1 cache memories at the right time.
So the limitations on the number of cores and/or SIMD width and count are completely determined by whether in the applications of interest it is possible to bring the data from the main memory to the L1 cache memories at the right times, or not.
This is what must be analyzed in discussions about such limits.
The right way to express a matrix multiplication is not that wrongly taught in schools, with scalar products of vectors, but as a sum of tensor products between the column vectors of the first matrix with those row vectors of the second matrix that share with them the same position of the element on the main diagonal of the matrix.
Computing a tensor product of two vectors, with the result accumulated in registers, requires a number of memory loads equal to the sum of the lengths of the vectors, but a number of FMA operations equal to the product of the lengths (i.e. for square matrices of size NxN, there are 2N loads and N^2 FMA for one tensor product, which multiplied with N tensor products give 2N^2 loads and N^3 FMA operations for the matrix multiplication).
Whenever the lengths of both vectors are are no less than 2 and at least one length is no less than 3, the product is greater than the sum. With greater vector lengths, the ratio between product and sum grows very quickly, so when the CPU has enough registers to hold the partial sum, the ratio between the counts of FMA operations and of memory loads can be very great.