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Why did it take around 10 years for AMD to implement AVX-512 and will they need to wait as long for this too? Doesn't seem to be patent related (patents are 20

by shmerl 3y ago

Why did it take around 10 years for AMD to implement AVX-512 and will they need to wait as long for this too? Doesn't seem to be patent related (patents are 20 years and AVX-512 was introduced in 2013?).

meepmorp 3y ago
Don’t Intel and AMD have cross licensing agreements for instruction set extensions?
- shmerl 3y ago
  That's what I thought too. But somehow AVX-512 took a long time for AMD.
  - colejohnson66 3y ago
    Implementing an instruction set isn’t as easy as “we have access to IP”
dralley 3y ago
Because Intel implementations of AVX-512 were pretty much unusable or not worth using until 2019-2020, so nobody was writing much AVX-512, so they didn't need to. AMD practically resurrected AVX-512 by supporting it across both desktop and server products, so it's weird to criticize them for taking a while when Intel nearly killed the thing via segmentation and poor implementation.
- shmerl 3y ago
  I'm not criticizing it, just wondering why it took that long and if it was due to patents or not.
  - danzk 3y ago
    AMD probably decided that their transistor budget was better spent elsewhere.
Falvyu 3y ago
If I were to guess: AVX512 vector and mask register take space on the die, which is a finite resource and could be allocated to other things. Moreover, power consumption may have also been a challenge, as seen in the early Intel implementations of AVX512 (especially Skylake-X). And while AVX512 can improve single-threaded performance, that's only for applications that make use of it. And up until recently, that number was extremely limited.
mort96 3y ago
I'm guessing the reason AVX512 took so long is that doubling the size increases complexity by a lot. This doesn't introduce wider vectors, so I don't see why it would take so long. But who knows if AMD sees value in these new instructions/if there's market demand for them.

by shmerl 3y ago

meepmorp 3y ago

Don’t Intel and AMD have cross licensing agreements for instruction set extensions?

shmerl 3y ago
That's what I thought too. But somehow AVX-512 took a long time for AMD.
- colejohnson66 3y ago
  Implementing an instruction set isn’t as easy as “we have access to IP”

dralley 3y ago

Because Intel implementations of AVX-512 were pretty much unusable or not worth using until 2019-2020, so nobody was writing much AVX-512, so they didn't need to. AMD practically resurrected AVX-512 by supporting it across both desktop and server products, so it's weird to criticize them for taking a while when Intel nearly killed the thing via segmentation and poor implementation.

shmerl 3y ago
I'm not criticizing it, just wondering why it took that long and if it was due to patents or not.
- danzk 3y ago
  AMD probably decided that their transistor budget was better spent elsewhere.

Falvyu 3y ago

If I were to guess: AVX512 vector and mask register take space on the die, which is a finite resource and could be allocated to other things. Moreover, power consumption may have also been a challenge, as seen in the early Intel implementations of AVX512 (especially Skylake-X). And while AVX512 can improve single-threaded performance, that's only for applications that make use of it. And up until recently, that number was extremely limited.

mort96 3y ago

I'm guessing the reason AVX512 took so long is that doubling the size increases complexity by a lot. This doesn't introduce wider vectors, so I don't see why it would take so long. But who knows if AMD sees value in these new instructions/if there's market demand for them.