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This study presents a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of the Arm-based AmpereOne A192-32X CPU, a high-performance but low power processor designed for cloud-native workloads characterized by high core occupancy, imperfectly-vectorized or even pure scalar software, limited need for high floating-point performance, and, increasingly, AI inference. These traits also characterize much of academic research computing. Hence a thorough investigation of this novel CPU seeking to characterize its strengths and weaknesses on academic workloads, including traditional HPC codes for which it was not designed, will shed light on its relevance in a research setting. We report comparative analyses with contemporary CPUs (Intel Sapphire Rapids, AMD EPYC, NVIDIA Grace-Grace) and illustrate AmpereOne’s architectural advantages in handling parallel workloads and optimizing power consumption. The CPUs are compared in terms of performance and power consumption using a wide range of applications covering different workloads and disciplines. 

Tuning tensor program generation involves navigating a vast search space to find optimal program transformations and measurements for a program on the target hardware. The complexity of this process is further amplified by the exponential combinations of transformations, especially in heterogeneous environments. This research addresses these challenges by introducing a novel approach that learns the joint neural network and hardware features space, facilitating knowledge transfer to new, unseen target hardware. A comprehensive analysis is conducted on the existing state-of-the-art dataset, TenSet, including a thorough examination of test split strategies and the proposal of methodologies for dataset pruning. Leveraging an attention-inspired technique, we tailor the tuning of tensor programs to embed both neural network and hardware-specific features. Notably, our approach substantially reduces the dataset size by up to 53% compared to the baseline without compromising Pairwise Comparison Accuracy (PCA). Furthermore, our proposed methodology demonstrates competitive or improved mean inference times with only 25–40% of the baseline tuning time across various networks and target hardware. The attention-based tuner can effectively utilize schedules learned from previous hardware program measurements to optimize tensor program tuning on previously unseen hardware, achieving a top-5 accuracy exceeding 90%. This research introduces a significant advancement in autotuning tensor program generation, addressing the complexities associated with heterogeneous environments and showcasing promising results regarding efficiency and accuracy.