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Show HN: Go Plan9 Memo

(pehringer.info)

302 points pehringer | 2 comments | 18 Oct 24 14:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.564s | source

A quick dive into the Plan9 assembly I picked up while developing my SIMD package for Go, and how it led to a 450% performance boost in calculations.

1. imiric ◴[18 Oct 24 23:18 UTC] No.41884353[source]▶

>>41879854 (OP) #

This is neat, and it's great that Go provides such simple access to low-level primitives.

But for the particular case of SIMD operations, wouldn't it make more sense to use the GPU instead of the CPU? GPUs excel at parallelism and matrix operations, so the performance difference would be even greater. I suppose the lack of well maintained GPU packages and community around it don't make Go particularly well suited for this.

replies(1): >>41885841 #

2. physicles ◴[19 Oct 24 05:31 UTC] No.41885841[source]▶

>>41884353 (TP) #

For a tool you run locally, a GPU could be an easy win. But most Go code is probably run on cloud servers. Adding requirements to your runtime environment isn't something to do lightly.

- SIMD: up to 400% speed boost, most likely on the same VMs you were already using

- GPU: orders of magnitude faster, but now you need to make sure your cloud servers have compatible GPUs attached

If you really do need crazy performance then it's worth it. If you're already stable and right-scaled and SIMD allows you to reduce your VM spend by 25%, then you probably just take the savings and move on.