Ask HN: Inexpensive dedicated servers for testing Skylake?

31 points

11 years ago

I have some SIMD algorithms that I'd like to check for performance on recent Intel chips. In particular, "gather" performance is reputed[1] to be much better on Skylake than earlier processors. Are there any cloud or dedicated server providers offering these yet?

I found http://www.reliablesite.net/dedicated-servers/quad-core-server/intel-core-i7-6700k starting at $99 month. But I'd prefer something by the hour rather than by the month, as it's really just proof of concept testing at this point, and I can probably do all the testing I need in several hours spread over a couple days.

I'm surprised Intel doesn't go more out of their way to make instances on these available to researchers and software developers. The potential of these newer chips is not reached by existing software, and it would seem to be in Intel's interest to encourage more research in to how to take full advantage of them.

[1] See "Fig 11-4 Throughput Comparison of Gather Instructions" in http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-optimization-manual.pdf

26 comments

26 comments