3 ms·

> Yes, but once it has shipped and people may have come to depend on it it will break stuff, not fix stuff. That may apply to every change, including things ev

> Yes, but once it has shipped and people may have come to depend on it it will break stuff, not fix stuff. That may apply to every change, including things everybody agrees on to be bug fixes. If, for example, you improve the number of correctly returned bits for computing sin, that can break programs, for example games that want to keep world models in exact sync across systems. From what I read here, intel didn’t advertise this feature and it wasn’t easily discovered. If so, I don’t think customers have any claim against Intel for the CPUs. _If_ motherboard vendors advertised/promoted it (could be as simple as blogging about it), I would think people who bought a motherboard because it allows activating this feature will have a case against them (in the EU and possibly elsewhere, the seller is responsible for the product being fit for purpose, not the manufacturer, so it would be the seller, but let’s ignore that) Legally, there also is the issue who applies that update. From what I read, that’s the motherboard. Here again, I would say that, if customers have a case, it would be against whomever sold them the motherboard (e.g. if that silently applies the update) I don’t see any indication that Intel, as a CPU manufacturer, forces existing customers to install this.

gambiting 5y ago
To add to this - even if the motherboard manufacturer allows this despite Intel's advice, in their stock configuration none of those CPUs allow AVX-512 instructions out of the box. You need to knowingly and conciously go into the BIOS and disable all efficiency cores first, to make this option even appear. So "as sold" the product doesn't support AVX-512 instructions and the advertising is absolutely correct. Just like you can overclock the CPU but it doesn't come overclocked out of the box(and Intel assumes no liability if you do overclock it).

gambiting 5y ago

To add to this - even if the motherboard manufacturer allows this despite Intel's advice, in their stock configuration none of those CPUs allow AVX-512 instructions out of the box. You need to knowingly and conciously go into the BIOS and disable all efficiency cores first, to make this option even appear. So "as sold" the product doesn't support AVX-512 instructions and the advertising is absolutely correct. Just like you can overclock the CPU but it doesn't come overclocked out of the box(and Intel assumes no liability if you do overclock it).