Search Results for: Intel NUC

Intel Neural Processing Unit (NPU) with ESXi

09.16.2024 by William Lam // 4 Comments

Starting with Intel Meteor Lake (14th Generation) CPUs, now part of the new Intel Core Ultra Processor (Series 1) brand, an integrated Neural Processing Unit or NPU is built right into the SoC (system-on-chip) and is optimized for low power AI Inferencing.

I found this article from Chips and Cheese about the new Intel Meteor Lake NPU to be super insightful, definitely recommend a read if you are new to NPUs.

While you can already consume the Intel integrated graphics (iGPU) in platforms like the Intel NUC with ESXi for workload inferencing, I was curious on whether this new Intel NPU could actually be used by ESXi? ?

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ESXi on SimplyNUC extremeEDGE 3000 Series

09.12.2024 by William Lam // 3 Comments

The folks over at SimplyNUC has recently launched an exciting new Edge-focused product line called the extremeEDGE (EE) Servers and I recently had the opportunity to try out their latest 3000 Series (3rd generation of their EE platform) in my homelab for some testing.

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Experimenting with ESXi CPU affinity and Intel Hybrid CPU Cores

01.16.2024 by William Lam // 23 Comments

After debugging a recent issue with using VMware Workstation and Intel Hybrid CPUs, it gave me an idea about an experiment to try with ESXi and Intel Hybrid CPUs.

As a refresher, starting with the Intel 12th Generation (Alder Lake) CPU, a new hybrid big.LITTLE CPU architecture was introduced for consumer Intel CPUs. This new hybrid Intel CPU architecture integrates two types of CPU cores: Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficiency-cores (E-cores) into the same physical CPU die. For more information about this new hybrid Intel CPU design, check out this resource HERE. The ESXi scheduler does not and has no current plans to support this new Intel Hybrid CPU architecture, especially as this type of architecture is nowhere to be found in traditional Enterprise datacenters and is only limited to Intel Consumer CPUs.

The current recommendation to work around the non-uniformity of the CPU cores is to either disable the E or P-cores within the system BIOS, thus making the system "uniform" and allowing ESXi to run like a normal x86 system. While you can apply a workaround to have ESXi ignore the non-uniformity of the CPU cores, in addition to the non-deterministic behaviors, random PSOD can also occur due to scheduling across two different types of cores.

I was curious to see whether applying ESXi CPU affinity on a VM using Intel Hybrid CPU Cores might yield a different outcome?

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