Ah it's mostly signal/video processing, very high throughput, compute-heavy, very little branching. AVX was kind of off-topic there, sorry... AVX512 (and vecto

Ah it's mostly signal/video processing, very high throughput, compute-heavy, very little branching. AVX was kind of off-topic there, sorry... AVX512 (and vector instructions) makes sense if you have very repetitive dense operations to do on your data. Think convolutions, filters, BLAS, FFT... Even better with dpdk since they run with hugepages so no tlb thrashing. DPDK has an option to use AVX512 for memory copy but I mostly do the computing + copy results in one pass, to maximize throughput. Zmq for zeromq yes, sorry. The abstraction (send arbitrary sized messages, receive messages, publish, subscribe, route messages... Same API for in-process, inter-process, inter-node) is so nice I miss it when we go down some levels of abstraction, especially with large large messages. I'm not sure I agree with Linus there. Intel is/was in a pinch, unable to ramp up FLOPS/mm2 and core count, they reached for vector instructions, in an extremely pragmatic 'what do you need them for - OK you'll get exactly those! And if you need something else, well... Have fun with the fun instruction set'. Intel also had (understandable) frequency throttling problems with how dense/hot the fused-multiply-add could get, but still painful and not detailed (discover weird frequency quirks on your 8000USD chip yay!) and have also been (to me) very unclear on the AVX512 roadmap (see recent Alderlake adventures). I get that Linus would like simpler, less kludgy solutions (more cores, more efficient cores, etc.) but if they exist in the cpu world, I'm waiting. Maybe ARM SVE whenever it will hit mainstream, maybe... The way for more raw flops is for the moment GPUs/accelerators - TPU, tenstorrent, FPGAs, mining ASICs being the extreme there - but they're their own cans of worms :-). So if you want very low latency (no going back and forth through PCIe and not motivated enough to use GPUdirect...) and still in the PC world, you're stuck. But AVX512 is actually a very good instruction set! Branch registers, most operations available, cross-lane instructions, all the shuffles you can imagine (well more than I can imagine) and recently avx512-fp16, the vectorized popcount... It's all getting better and better. A real shame we don't have more hardware with it - starting TigerLake you get it in consumer hardware! good luck with thermals but it gives a taste.