AVX-512 is the first intel ISA extension that support masking (i.e. each lane can be enabled or disabled independently), which allows for somewhat generalized v

AVX-512 is the first intel ISA extension that support masking (i.e. each lane can be enabled or disabled independently), which allows for somewhat generalized vectorization. Without masking, vectorization need to be performed ad hoc and masking possibly emulated (which is hard to do for loads and stores).