Alongside this week’s AOCC 6.0 compiler release, which I already wrote about, AMD has also shipped AOCL 6.0, its Optimizing CPU Libraries, Phoronix reports. Now that EPYC 9006 “Venice” chips are shipping, the library stack is getting its first round of Zen 6 tuning, plus some work that still helps earlier Zen 4 and Zen 5 parts.
AOCL-BLAS, the cryptography and data-analytics components, AOCL-DLP (including INT8 improvements) and AOCL-LibMem all pick up Zen 6 work. The new library is AOCL-OpenRNG, an open-source random-number generator with AVX2-optimized kernels, 11 base generators and 17 statistical distributions, on Windows and Linux. There’s also a TBB back-end for AOCL-Compression, compile-time ISA enablement in the compression code, and new or hardened APIs in FFTW and LAPACK.
Review before you install: read the release notes yourself, back up your config, and try new versions somewhere you can afford to break first.
My take
AOCL is the other half of AMD’s “we just launched Zen 6” software story. A new open RNG and wider library tuning won’t show up in a desktop screenshot, but they’re what number-crunching code actually hits. I’ll be curious how OpenRNG compares to the usual options once people start measuring it.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
