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August 22, 2020 06:34 pm

Intel Defends AVX-512 Against Critics Who Hope It 'Dies a Painful Death'

"I hope AVX512 dies a painful death," Linus Torvalds said last month, "and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on." Friday PC World published some reactions from Intel:Torvalds wasn't the only person to kick AVX-512 in the shins either. Former Intel engineer Francois Piednoel also said the special instruction simply didn't belong in laptops, as the power and die space area trade-offs just aren't worth it. But Intel Chief Architect Raja Koduri says their community loves it because they're seeing a huge performance boost:"AVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community, AI community, love it," Koduri said, responding to a question from PCWorld about the AVX-512 kerfuffle during Intel's Architecture Day on August 11. "Our customers on the data center side really, really, really love it." Koduri said Intel has been able to help customers achieve a 285X increase in performance in "our good old CPU socket" just by taking advantage of the extension... Koduri acknowledged some validity to Torvald's heat, too. "Linus' criticism from one angle that 'hey, are there client applications that leverage this vector bit yet?' may be valid," he said. Koduri explained further that Intel has to maintain a hardware software contract all the way from servers to laptops, because that's been the magic of the ecosystem. "(That's) the great thing about the x86 ecosystem, you could write a piece of software for your notebook and it could also run on the cloud," Kodori said. "That's been the power of the x86 ecosystem..." And no, hate on AVX-512 and special instructions all you want, Intel isn't going to change direction. Koduri said it will continue to lean on AVX-512 as well as other instructions. "We understand Linus' concerns, we understand some of the issues with first generation AVX-512 that had impact on the frequencies etc, etc," he said "and we are making it much much better with every generation." They also summarize some performance testing by blogger Travis Downs, saying it found AVX-512 "doesn't appear to enforce much of a penalty at all on a laptops. Downs' testing found the clock speed only dropped 100MHz when using one active core under AVX-512. "At least, it means we need to adjust our mental model of the frequency related cost of AVX-512 instructions," Downs concluded. "Rather than 'generally causing significant downclocking,' on this Ice Lake chip we can say that AVX-512 causes insignificant or zero licence-based downclocking and I expect this to be true on other Ice Lake client chips as well."

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