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Intel Might Be Bringing Back AVX-512 Support In Future Client CPUs

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by admin May 02, 2023

Intel could be planning to bring back AVX-512 support to its client CPUs after removing it entirely from its chip lineup last year.

Reports Suggest Intel Bringing Back AVX-512 In Some Shape or Form In Future Client CPUs

Back in 2021, quickly following the 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs, Intel introduced its 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs featuring a hybrid core architecture. The processors supported both AVX-256 and AVX-512 instruction sets, however, in the months following its launch, we would see Intel back out and  start disabling AVX-512 support in new silicon batches. For the older processors that did have AVX-512 support, Intel even went ahead to force motherboard makers to remove AVX-512 support that could be enabled through the BIOS.

This decision was made to make users pay extra for the Xeon chips for features such as AVX-512 & entirely remove support from the newer 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs. This meant that the 11th Gen Tiger Lake chips are the last official family from Intel to support AVX-512 instructions.

Meanwhile, AMD introduced its brand new Zen 4 core architecture for the Ryzen 7000 CPU family which features full support of AVX-512 instructions. These instructions are readily available on all Ryzen client chips that support the new Zen 4 architecture and this has made Ryzen to be one of the top choices for game emulation such as the RPCS3 Sony PS3 emulator amongst various other workloads that can benefit from such instructions.

For example, the AVX-512 instructions on AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs can help boost FP32 inferencing speeds by up to 30% and Int8 inferencing speeds (VNNI) by up to 2.5x. This gives AMD a major CPU advantage over Intel's client chips which haven't offered proper or should I say official AVX-512 set support for the past two generations.

However, this could change as an AWS Cloud engineer, Longhorn (@never_released) states that the AVX-512 support is coming back to Intel's client CPUs, & that has been the plan for a while though we might have to wait and see which exact generations bring it back. Also, there are reports that Intel might rename AVX-512 to something else for client CPUs. Locuza tweeted that Intel's next E-Core architecture, Crestmont, which goes inside Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest chips, isn't going to feature AVX-512 support so it is likely that Meteor Lake with the rumored Skymont E-Cores might bring it back.

There are some possibilities that AVX-512 can be enabled when E-Cores are disabled but replying to Locuza, leaker @OneRaichu mentions another possibility and that's AVX-256 Plus for consumer grade (Client) CPUs. It will be interesting to see if Intel goes by this plan but one thing is for sure that a lot is expected to change once Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake chips launch.

Written by Hassan Mujtaba

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