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Naive question: Are you able to use MKL on an AMD chip without jumping through too many hoops?

Yes, just pip install ..., but it's 2x slower than on Intel for Zen/Zen+. Only Zen 2 is close to Intel.

Intel makes rather pessimistic assumptions about AMD and uses the model name to pick which code path to use and ignores the CPU flags for floating point, etc.

So if you want to compare performance fairly I'd use gcc (or at least a non-intel compiler) and one of the MKL like libraries (ACML, gotoblas, openblas, etc). AMD has been directly contributing to various projects to optimize for AMD CPUs. They used to have their own compiler (that went from SGI -> cray -> pathscale or similar), but since then I believe have been contributing to GCC, LLVM, and various libraries.

Yeah, still, Zen 2 is much faster in OpenBLAS and is faster in MKL than Zen/+ as well.

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