How to know whether Xeon CPU supports ISA-l？

[PhilYu20]

How to know whether Xeon CPU supports ISA-l, such as Intel Xeon Gold 6354 Processor? If the intel cpu supports the corresponding instruction set (such as sse, avx and avx2), this CPU can support ISA-l？

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[gbtucker]

Hi @PhilYu20. ISA-L has multi-binary dispatchers and base functions that will run on a wide variety of architectures. The dispatcher will pick an appropriate version at run time. ISA-L has many functions that were optimized specifically for this processor in mind.

[fredfany]

I heard that isa-l can only run on x86 architecture, but looking at the current code, it seems to support other architectures, such as ARM aarch64, and I want to determine if this is true. If so, then is the performance of the ARM architecture inferior to X86？
Great appreciation!

[rhpvorderman]

If so, then is the performance of the ARM architecture inferior to X86？

@Fanyuanli Well, I think you can't really see it that way. The base level performance is zlib. Zlib performance also differs between platforms. You can't really speak of inferior/superior, as you have to work with the hardware that you have. If a library can provide a speedup advantage compared to zlib, then it is worth considering in my opinion.

I maintain the python-bindings for ISA-L. Supposedly ISA-L can run on all platforms due to its base functions which are implemented in C. I have tested the optimizations on x86_64 quite extensively. On my machine (Ryzen 5-3600) ISA-L performs roughly 2 times faster than zlib when decompressing and roughly 5(!) times faster for level 1 compression than zlib.
I do have an aarch64 development board (Olimex Olinuxino A64 with Allwinner A64 chip). On this board there is no real measurable difference between zlib and ISA-L in decompression, however it performs 3 times faster when compressing on level 1.

On both x86_64 and aarch64 I therefore wholeheartedly recommend ISA-L. If you also want a speedup for compression levels higher than 3 I recommend also looking at zlib-ng.

[fredfany]

Sorry for a late response! I've done my test and I got what I wander. Thanks again for your professional and patient answers. I'd really appreaicate you! @gbtucker @rhpvorderman