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I don't think Intel ever intended AVX-512 to be used by people who buy non-enterprise chips. People getting them enabled with workarounds (disabling E-cores) p
by willis936 5y ago
I don't think Intel ever intended AVX-512 to be used by people who buy non-enterprise chips. People getting them enabled with workarounds (disabling E-cores) probably signaled to Intel that they needed to shut it down.
It's nasty, but it's how Intel operates. AVX-512 and ECC are some of the few value adds for their Xeon line. They couldn't get away with charging 3x as much for the same processor otherwise.
- eMSF 5y agoAVX-512 in consumer chips was not new to Alder Lake, though; the previous generation did support it without any workarounds (there were no E-cores to disable to begin with). Intel may have changed course regarding AVX-512 but I wouldn't be so sure about the reasons.
- willis936 5y agoThat's true, but it seems like the consumer chips that did have AVX-512 came out when Intel did not have the single threaded performance crown. We can only speculate on what Intel's motives and plans are. I think they should embrace any ISA advantage they can muster in every CPU they sell.
- tyrfing 5y agoThe Xeon exclusive for this generation is AMX, and I believe Sapphire Rapids has 2 AVX-512 pipelines (sorry, too early to remember the correct term) vs 1 on Alder Lake / Rocket Lake. Disabling it on the consumer chips is related to the heterogenous architecture, since E-cores don't have support. Nobody knows exactly why they decided to fuse it off to disable with E-cores turned off, my guess is because it isn't fully validated/tested (save money) and a very unusual config to start with. Sucks for the 50 people who wanted to run that one emulator, and "save money" is a pretty bad reason for a halo KS product. ECC is available on the consumer chips as of Alder Lake, it's supported with the W680 chipset.