If Matlab performance is important for competitive reasons, AMD should hire a few SW engineers to build tuned linear-algebra libraries like Intel does. It’s not

If Matlab performance is important for competitive reasons, AMD should hire a few SW engineers to build tuned linear-algebra libraries like Intel does. It’s not rocket science. They could be competitive or faster with a low-millions-per-year investment (and only slightly behind with a much smaller investment in grad students and open source). I worked on these sorts of libraries (not at Intel) for a decade, it’s very, very common to dispatch on CPU family rather than feature flags, because performance details are tied to the microarchitecture, not availability of the feature. Even though Skylake and Haswell both support AVX2 and FMA, there are huge differences in implementation that effect what the best implementation will be, so you can’t just say “oh, FMA is available, use version 37.” Instead you do “if we’re on Skylake, use the Skylake version, if we’re on Haswell, use the Haswell version, otherwise fall back on the generic runs-anywhere version.” Nothing underhanded about it.