Thursday, March 3rd 2022
Intel is Now Fusing Off AVX-512 support in Alder Lake CPUs
If you have already bought a 12th gen Intel Alder Lake CPU, you could be sitting on a collectors item, as according to Tom's Hardware, Intel is now fusing off AVX-512 support in production. It's possible this could be in preparation for the arrival of the Core "W" series of CPUs that might be replacing the Xeon-W series of processors for Intel. It should be noted that this isn't a rumour, as Tom's Hardware has had an official statement on the matter from Intel.
The statement reads, "Although AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to fuse off AVX-512 on Alder Lake products going forward." As to exactly when this will go into full effect isn't clear, but according to Tom's Hardware, they've already had reports of batches of non-K Alder Lake CPUs that are lacking AVX-512 support. In all fairness to Intel, the company never claimed that its Alder Lake CPUs would support AVX-512 and the support has never been guaranteed to be flawless on the chips that have shipped with it enabled. Intel has also disabled AVX-512 via a microcode update that shipped to motherboard makers in January, but at least some motherboard makers have added a toggle to allow people to re-enable AVX-512 support. It's unlikely that this will affect many potential customers, since AVX-512 instructions aren't widely used in consumer facing software.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The statement reads, "Although AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to fuse off AVX-512 on Alder Lake products going forward." As to exactly when this will go into full effect isn't clear, but according to Tom's Hardware, they've already had reports of batches of non-K Alder Lake CPUs that are lacking AVX-512 support. In all fairness to Intel, the company never claimed that its Alder Lake CPUs would support AVX-512 and the support has never been guaranteed to be flawless on the chips that have shipped with it enabled. Intel has also disabled AVX-512 via a microcode update that shipped to motherboard makers in January, but at least some motherboard makers have added a toggle to allow people to re-enable AVX-512 support. It's unlikely that this will affect many potential customers, since AVX-512 instructions aren't widely used in consumer facing software.
36 Comments on Intel is Now Fusing Off AVX-512 support in Alder Lake CPUs
Fact is, a lot of games could benefit. But it's a chicken and the egg problem, and product segmentation makes it only worse. Devs won't add support until it's mainstream, etc.
This actually makes Rocket Lake more appealing to me than Alder Lake, lol.
Don't believe I've ever seen bios avx 512 offset ever kicking in at any level I've ever used.
R uses it.
If you write any optimized code on an Intel machine and use an Intel compiler or just link to an Intel Library (i.e. MLK, Performance Primitives) it will try to use AVX-512.
Probably Intel wants to sell Xeon's to the I9 consumers.
I'd have to look at the description of what avx 512 offset set at auto actually does lol
So I see this as Intel shooting itself in the foot. Yes, the efficiency cores don't support AVX-512. So there should be a software solution.
Perhaps Intel should do what they did back in 80386 days and put these instructions in a co-processor again.