I've used it a fair bit, but it's too exotic to show up on enough machines to really focus on. It's not just a trick to make benchmarks run faster; that's an id

I've used it a fair bit, but it's too exotic to show up on enough machines to really focus on. It's not just a trick to make benchmarks run faster; that's an idiotic conspiracy theory. It's just that the release of AVX-512 happens to coincide with the 10nm disaster. Probably the biggest problem is that new Intel ISAs often are associated with downclocking (this isn't new with AVX-512 - AVX2 had it as well). Usually these problems were short-lived, but with 10nm getting stalled, they've stuck around longer. This is pure poison if like me, you generally write libraries. It's scary to look at some 60% speedup you might get from some neat rewrite for your bit of the task, but then wonder whether you're going to make the rest of the task several percent slower due to a downclock in what might only be 20% of the time. So it's hard to make the call to use AVX-512 in its early stages unless you control the whole core. Linus thinks that everything is either a kernel or a gcc execution, and happily disregards anything that doesn't fit his own workloads. AVX-512 can do Good Things for a disparate range of stuff - in-memory databases, regex/string matching, bioinformatics, CPU intensive network workloads, parsing and lexing as well as the usual scientific computing and AI workloads (many of the latter are also pretty good on GPGPU).