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Intel Nukes Alder Lake's AVX-512 Support, Now Fuses It Off in Silicon

• belval 5y ago
  > The company initially claimed the feature wouldn't work on its new 12th Gen processors and then backtracked when motherboard vendors found multiple workarounds to enable the commands. After a bit of cat and mouse with motherboard vendors that built new firmware to enable the feature despite Intel's attempts at disabling it, the company has finally decided to deploy the nuclear option and fuse off AVX-512 support entirely inside newer revisions of the Alder Lake chips. To me, if Intel said it wouldn't work and board manufacturer found a way around it that's cool, but I don't have anything against them actually fusing it off. We don't know how their yields are. It's entirely possible that they dropped AVX-512 because no-one was using it in consumer CPUs yet they had to support it as a "feature" and that meant QC headaches. In other word, Intel sells that CPU without AVX-512 capabilities. It means that by fusing it off they aren't downgrading the product that they are selling. You get what you pay for.
  • skavi 5y ago
    No one was using it in consumer hardware because it had only arrived in consumer hardware with Ice Lake. It's a great improvement over AVX2, so it's too bad Intel couldn't find a way to make it work for Alder Lake.
    • belval 5y ago
      100% agree, my point is that every time this particular topic comes up, people pull out their pitchforks as if it was a shady bait-and-switch by Intel. However they said from Day 1 that these CPU did not support AVX-512 so it's not surprising that faced with uncooperative partners they decided to just fuse it off.