In real-world code there really is no huge performance difference between FMA3 and FMA4, certainly not anything on the scale of 33%. Not sure where that number even comes from. 4 = 3 + 33%? 😛 The comparisons in Wendells video are of AVX vs FMA4, not accounting for FMA3.

[youtube=YAoaSuq1E8w] There's the full in depth video on the subject. I just love the guys over at Level1Techs. They're very open and knowledgeable. Also their weekly news episodes makes me giggle like a girl.

nevcairiel:

In real-world code there really is no huge performance difference between FMA3 and FMA4, certainly not anything on the scale of 33%. Not sure where that number even comes from. 4 = 3 + 33%? 😛 The comparisons in Wendells video are of AVX vs FMA4, not accounting for FMA3.

No, FMA4 has 33% higher throughput, because it processes four operands per instruction instead of three.

So Zen could potentially be even faster than it already is???

in very narrow and particular scenarios where you need tons of multiply add and someone writing software enabled this feature, yes

BLEH!:

So Zen could potentially be even faster than it already is???

AMD knows only why FMA4 isn't activated. Also is not instruction set but a single instruction doing calculations. Maybe because Intel doesn't support FMA3, AMD decided not to "officially" do anything about this either. Or there are issues with the results returned on Ryzen 1xxxx series.

Fediuld:

AMD knows only why FMA4 isn't activated. Also is not instruction set but a single instruction doing calculations. Maybe because Intel doesn't support FMA3, AMD decided not to "officially" do anything about this either. Or there are issues with the results returned on Ryzen 1xxxx series.

Could be any number of things.

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

No, FMA4 has 33% higher throughput, because it processes four operands per instruction instead of three.

No, thats not how it works. Both FMA3 and FMA4 calculate the same thing, its always "a * b + c". 3 input operands. The only difference between FMA3 and FMA4 is where the result is being stored. In FMA3, you have to store the result in one of the input operands, its called a "destructive" instruction, because it overwrites one of the inputs. In FMA4, you have a separate output register, a 4th operand, so its "non-destructive". If you wanted to simplify it, you could look at it like this: FMA3: a = a * b + c (3 operands) FMA4: d = a * b + c (4 operands) The math is exactly the same, it saves you the same number of operations, only the location of the result differs. This difference can have advantages in some algorithms, but in modern CPUs and the majority of algorithms, the impact from this difference is marginal at best, thanks to features like register renaming. An additional "move" instruction to copy the data into an additional register is often extremely cheap - if its even needed in the algorithm in question.

This is an old news. Moreover seems that using FMA4 under Zen gives wrong results: https://translate.google.it/translate?hl=it&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/threads/421433-AMD-Zen-14nm-8-Kerne-95W-TDP-DDR4?p=5147746&viewfull=1

Fediuld:

AMD knows only why FMA4 isn't activated. Also is not instruction set but a single instruction doing calculations. Maybe because Intel doesn't support FMA3, AMD decided not to "officially" do anything about this either. Or there are issues with the results returned on Ryzen 1xxxx series.

Intel supports FMA3 since Haswell.

Alessio1989:

This is an old news. Moreover seems that using FMA4 under Zen gives wrong results: https://translate.google.it/translate?hl=it&sl=de&tl=en&u=http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/threads/421433-AMD-Zen-14nm-8-Kerne-95W-TDP-DDR4?p=5147746&viewfull=1 Intel supports FMA3 since Haswell.

Very very old news. https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=838 news should be reworded to "in a video that could only be considered clickbaiting, level1techs has reported on something we already knew a year ago"