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Linus Torvalds: "I Hope AVX512 Dies A Painful Death

SantaC

Gold Member
Linus Torvalds (creator of linux) has some harsh words towards intel

I hope AVX512 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.

I hope Intel gets back to basics: gets their process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn't HPC or some other pointless special case.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota.

Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks.

The same is largely true of AVX512 now - and in the future. Yes, you can find things that care. No, those things don't sell machines in the big picture.

And AVX512 has real downsides. I'd much rather see that transistor budget used on other things that are much more relevant. Even if it's still FP math (in the GPU, rather than AVX512). Or just give me more cores (with good single-thread performance, but without the garbage like AVX512) like AMD did.

I want my power limits to be reached with regular integer code, not with some AVX512 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).

 

LordOfChaos

Member
I like AVX-512 for some use cases, but it's not used much at all. I definitely see his argument. AMD packs in twice as many cores not only because of them using a denser process, but also AVX-512 is just big. For 99% of people, better cores or more cores would work better for that use of die area. Maybe keep them for a professional line, because in some use cases a humble dual core with AVX-512 can beat out much more impressive processors, but again it's just not used much.

When it's fast, it's fast as fuck, but I am a very small niche.
 
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nowhat

Gold Member
haha, yup, there you have one of those epic Linus moments. Completely agree with Linux, Nividia support on Linux is abysmal.
I mean, the proprietary drivers offer nice performance at least for certain tasks. Just that when things go to shit (and they can/will), there's no way for the kernel devs to debug anything because the "driver" is just some wrapper code around a "firmware" that's essentially a black box consisting of tens of megabytes of code. So I can understand his frustration.
 
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