Intel Architecture Manual Updates: bfloat16 for Cooper Lake Xeon Scalable Only?

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Intel recently released a new version of its document for software developers revealing some additional details about its upcoming Xeon Scalable ‘Cooper Lake-SP’ processors. As it appears, the new CPUs will support AVX512_BF16 instructions and therefore the bfloat16 format. Meanwhile, the main intrigue here is the fact that at this point AVX512_BF16 seems to be only supported by the Cooper Lake-SP microarchitecture, but not its direct successor, the Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture.

The bfloat16 is a truncated 16-bit version of the 32-bit IEEE 754 single-precision floating-point format that preserves 8 exponent bits, but reduces precision of the significand from 24-bits to 8 bits to save up memory, bandwidth, and processing resources, while still retaining the same range. The bfloat16 format was designed primarily for machine learning and near-sensor computing applications, where precision is needed near to 0 but not so much at the maximum range. The number representation is supported by Intel’s upcoming FPGAs as well as Nervana neural network processors, and Google’s TPUs. Given the fact that Intel supports the bfloat16 format across two of its product lines, it makes sense to support it elsewhere as well, which is what the company is going to do by adding its AVX512_BF16 instructions support to its upcoming Xeon Scalable ‘Cooper Lake-SP’ platform.

The list of Intel’s AVX512_BF16 Vector Neural Network Instructions includes VCVTNE2PS2BF16, VCVTNEPS2BF16, and VDPBF16PS. All of them can be executed in 128-bit, 256-bit, or 512-bit mode, so software developers can pick up one of a total of nine versions based on their requirements.

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