{"id":6998,"date":"2020-08-20T21:52:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T21:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/intel-defends-avx-512-against-critics-who-wish-it-to-die-a-painful-death\/"},"modified":"2020-08-20T21:52:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T21:52:00","slug":"intel-defends-avx-512-against-critics-who-wish-it-to-die-a-painful-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aviancetechnologies.com\/blog\/intel-defends-avx-512-against-critics-who-wish-it-to-die-a-painful-death\/","title":{"rendered":"Intel defends AVX-512 against critics who wish it to die a ‘painful death’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Intel defends AVX-512 against critics who wish it to die a ‘painful death’<\/h2>\n

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Intel has finally defended its AVX-512 instruction set against critics who have gone so far as to wish it to die \u201ca painful death.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Intel Chief Architect Raja Koduri said the community loves it because it yields huge performance boosts, and Intel has an obligation to offer it across its portfolio.<\/p>\n

\u201cAVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community, AI community, love it,\u201d Koduri said, responding to a question from PCWorld\u00a0about the AVX-512 kerfuffle during Intel\u2019s Architecture Day on August 11.\u00a0\u201cOur customers on the data center side really, really, really love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Koduri said Intel has been able to help customers achieve a 285X increase in performance in \u201cour good old CPU socket\u201d just by taking advantage of the extension.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Intel said AVX-512 has given customers an exponential increase in performance.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One person who doesn\u2019t love AVX-512 is Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux. In a forum post at Real World Technologies<\/a>\u00a0(where he often chimes in), Torvalds spoke plainly about the instruction set that\u2019s included in Intel\u2019s Xeon CPUs and its 10th-gen \u201cIce Lake\u201d laptop CPU such as the Core i7-1065G7.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope AVX-512 dies a painful death, and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on,\u201d Torvalds wrote. \u201cI hope Intel gets back to basics: Gets their process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn\u2019t HPC or some other pointless special case.\u201d<\/p>\n

Torvalds said what galled him about AVX-512 on desktops was the performance hit. Intel\u2019s original Skylake-X series, for example, would be forced to lower the CPU clock speed during anything that touched AVX-512.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want my power limits to be reached with regular integer code, not with some AVX-512 power virus that takes away top frequency (because people ended up using it for memcpy!) and takes away cores (because those useless garbage units take up space),\u201d Torvalds wrote.<\/p>\n

Torvalds wasn\u2019t the only person to kick AVX-512 in the shins either. Former Intel engineer Francois Piednoel also said the special instruction simply didn\u2019t belong in laptops, as the power and die space area trade-offs just aren\u2019t worth it.<\/p>\n

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Using AVX-512, Intel has made huge strides for data center AI customers it claims,.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Intel\u2019s AVX-512 enables a broad ecosystem<\/h2>\n

Koduri said he understood the hate, but Intel has obligations to the community, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur CPU cores are our crown jewels,\u201d Koduri said. \u201cSo when we do a CPU core and add an instruction to it, historically the power of x86 and our instruction set extensions have been that we made them available everywhere. Because of that, when we have an IP like Sunny Cove and it appears both in a server like an Ice Lake server and on a client, like an Ice Lake client, you get the commonality of the instruction set.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Koduri acknowledged some validity to Torvald\u2019s heat, too. “Linus\u2019 criticism from one angle that \u2018hey, are there client applications that leverage this vector bit yet?\u2019 may be valid,\u201d he said. Koduri explained further that Intel has to maintain a hardware software contract all the way from servers to laptops, because that\u2019s been the magic of the ecosystem.<\/p>\n