With most available software packages floating point arithmetic remains much faster than integer arithmetic, but because those software packages do not use the

With most available software packages floating point arithmetic remains much faster than integer arithmetic, but because those software packages do not use the more recent CPU features, since thanks to Intel's stupidity there still are many CPUs which do not support those features. Already in 2018, with Cannon Lake, Intel has introduced instructions (IFMA) which can reuse for integer computations the same vector multipliers and adders that are provided for floating-point computations. However, later Intel has removed AVX-512 from its consumer CPUs. The latest models of Intel CPUs have introduced a slower AVX-encoded variant of IFMA, but this is too little and too late, in comparison with what AMD offers. Using IFMA and the other AVX-512 integer vector instructions, where supported, it is possible to obtain very similar throughputs, regardless if the computation is done with integer or floating-point numbers. Hopefully, with the growing installed base of Zen 4 and Zen 5 based computers there will be the incentive to update many software packages to take advantage of their capabilities.