Deep Learning, and Intel’s MKL-DNN
Intel’s MKL , for those of you who’ve never actually had to worry about math performance, is basically a library of hand-optimized code for serious math, including Linear Algebra (BLAS , LAPACK , etc.), FFTs , vector math, and whatnot. And yeah, it’s specific to Intel’s processors (hence “Intel’s MKL ”) with effectively free licensing . If you’re doing any kind of heavy lifting in science / math / fintech / etc, you’re probably already using this somewhere in your stack! MKL-DNN is a library built on MKL which adds in optimizations specific to Deep Neural Networks (hence the “DNN” part 😀). It’s been out since late 2016 , but there are fairly frequent updates as new models and techniques become popular (and boy howdy, is the pace of change rapid in this field!). At heart though, it takes a decent chunk of Neural Network primitive — things like convolution , normalization , tensor manipulation , etc. — a...