<story><title>Intel Prepares to Graft Google’s Bfloat16 onto Processors</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/07/15/intel-prepares-to-graft-googles-bfloat16-onto-processors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kolbusa</author><text>ISA: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;software.intel.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;managed&amp;#x2F;c5&amp;#x2F;15&amp;#x2F;architecture-instruction-set-extensions-programming-reference.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;software.intel.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;managed&amp;#x2F;c5&amp;#x2F;15...&lt;/a&gt;
Look for anything marked with AVX512_BF16 CPUID feature flag.&lt;p&gt;Numerical details: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;software.intel.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;managed&amp;#x2F;40&amp;#x2F;8b&amp;#x2F;bf16-hardware-numerics-definition-white-paper.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;software.intel.com&amp;#x2F;sites&amp;#x2F;default&amp;#x2F;files&amp;#x2F;managed&amp;#x2F;40&amp;#x2F;8b...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Support for bfloat16 is already present in MKL-DNN (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;intel&amp;#x2F;mkl-dnn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;intel&amp;#x2F;mkl-dnn&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I work for Intel</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel Prepares to Graft Google’s Bfloat16 onto Processors</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/07/15/intel-prepares-to-graft-googles-bfloat16-onto-processors/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>choppaface</author><text>I met Naveen Rao after Intel bought Nervana.  He seemed pretty adamant about getting stuff shipped fast.  In contrast, the Xeon folks own all the politics and seem to want the transition to be very gradual.  Plus the Phi folks get phased out.  They had done a Nervana trial at Facebook but then flaked on other trials. Clearly Intel is trying to desperately manage their books.&lt;p&gt;Having Nervana and friends on a Xeon chip could be a huge positive change for software.  Not only could we toss out the issue of GPU memory transfer, but Nvidia GPUs aren’t so great with concurrency, and here with the linux kernel we might have a chance to beat Nvidia.  Naveen sure would like that... Nervana once had a Maxwell compiler that was better than Nvidia’s.</text></comment>