Description
Discussed here, summarized here, and at Hacker News here. Quoting the 2nd source,
"Hunter benchmarks USM3D, is described by NASA as “a tetrahedral unstructured flow solver that has become widely used in industry, government, and academia for solving aerodynamic problems. Since its first introduction in 1989, USM3D has steadily evolved from an inviscid Euler solver into a full viscous Navier-Stokes code.”
As previously noted, this is a computational fluid dynamics test, and CFD tests are notoriously memory bandwidth sensitive. We’ve never tested USM3D at ExtremeTech and it isn’t an application that I’m familiar with, so we reached out to Hunter for some additional clarification on the test itself and how he compiled it for each platform. There has been some speculation online that the M1 Ultra hit these performance levels thanks to advanced matrix extensions or another, unspecified optimization that was not in play for the Intel platform."