Hardware Configuration Tips

Optimization Notice

The Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) contains functions that are more highly optimized for Intel microprocessors than for other microprocessors. While the functions in Intel® MKL offer optimizations for both Intel and Intel-compatible microprocessors, depending on your code and other factors, you will likely get extra performance on Intel microprocessors.

While the paragraph above describes the basic optimization approach for Intel® MKL as a whole, the library may or may not be optimized to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations. Intel does not guarantee the availability, functionality, or effectiveness of any optimization on microprocessors not manufactured by Intel. Microprocessor-dependent optimizations in this product are intended for use with Intel microprocessors.

Intel recommends that you evaluate other library products to determine which best meets your requirements.

Dual-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5100 series systems

To get the best performance with the Intel(R) Math Kernel Library (Intel(R) MKL) on Dual-Core Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5100 series systems, enable the Hardware DPL (streaming data) Prefetcher functionality of this processor. To configure this functionality, use the appropriate BIOS settings, as described in your BIOS documentation.

The use of Hyper-Threading Technology

Hyper-Threading Technology (HT Technology) is especially effective when each thread performs different types of operations and when there are under-utilized resources on the processor. However, Intel MKL fits neither of these criteria because the threaded portions of the library execute at high efficiencies using most of the available resources and perform identical operations on each thread. You may obtain higher performance by disabling HT Technology.

If you run with HT enabled, performance may be especially impacted if you run on fewer threads than physical cores. Moreover, if, for example, there are two threads to every physical core, the thread scheduler may assign two threads to some cores and ignore the other cores altogether. If you are using the OpenMP* library of the Intel Compiler, read the respective User Guide on how to best set the thread affinity interface to avoid this situation. For Intel MKL, apply the following setting:

set KMP_AFFINITY=granularity=fine,compact,1,0

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