AVX-512 Is an Intel Gimmick To Win Benchmarks and should die a painful death

AVX has 256 bit support, but it's restricted to floating point only. AVX2 added 256 bit support for integers, and also added FMA for double throughput.

Source

 

So all people in the world always say/write "GNU Linux" never shrinking it to "Linux"? And when I read "Linux" people always talk about kernel of "GNU Linux"?

 

I think hes more just peeved about intel selectively implementing it, the comment is in response to some gcc patches for alderlake, which lacks avx 512, the "rant' is not from the kernel mailing list, so consider it off the cuff , and not kernel related.

 

Haha yeah it gets confusing. We always use "linux" to actually talk about GNU Linux, but in this particular thread the use of the correct term makes sense.

 

My bad I should have been more clear

 

What about the man in the middle?

 

People, including myself, tend to drop the GNU when referring to Linux as an OS, because most of the time it's implied and just pedantic. But even without the distinction, the context of this discussion is just the Linux kernel.
I'd say most people who know what Linux is don't know about the distinction. For most people, including those who use it, the distinction is irrelevant. It just happens to not be irrelevant right now haha.

 

The linux community and its leader Winus Torrent of Tears Torvald are a major reason why linux does not have higher market penetration. Who wants to deal with toxic toddlers when you have an issue? It's been that way for decades.

 

I should have been more clear. When I wrote "widespread" I meant in terms of hardware support. My four-year old laptop supports it and every newer machine I have does too. As for software support I really don't know anything about its adoption rate.

 

I think @schmidtbag has led you down the wrong path. The answer to your question is 'nothing'. Linus was criticizing Intel for the sake of criticism, not related to his own work. As he puts it, he wants Intel to start "fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on"

Linux has great marketshare in every sector other than home computers. To break into the home, Linux's issues relate to the lack of marketing, ease of use, and app compatibility. Pretty much in that order, the last two getting better all the time though. What you perceive as a 'toxic' community is sooo far down the list of issues. The vast majority of regular users rarely know what Linux is.

 

Your correct, it's AVX not AVX2
https://www.reddit.com/r/assassinscreed/comments/9m6550/update_on_avx_support/
And yes, AVX2 might soon be the minimum requirement for triple A games.

 

Here's a sample of what I was referring to. These are two context structures used for AMD64 architecture CPUs. :

Code:

//
// Nonvolatile context pointer record.
//

typedef struct _KNONVOLATILE_CONTEXT_POINTERS {
    union {
        PM128A FloatingContext[16];
        struct {
            PM128A Xmm0;
            PM128A Xmm1;
            PM128A Xmm2;
            PM128A Xmm3;
            PM128A Xmm4;
            PM128A Xmm5;
            PM128A Xmm6;
            PM128A Xmm7;
            PM128A Xmm8;
            PM128A Xmm9;
            PM128A Xmm10;
            PM128A Xmm11;
            PM128A Xmm12;
            PM128A Xmm13;
            PM128A Xmm14;
            PM128A Xmm15;
        } DUMMYSTRUCTNAME;
    } DUMMYUNIONNAME;

    union {
        PDWORD64 IntegerContext[16];
        struct {
            PDWORD64 Rax;
            PDWORD64 Rcx;
            PDWORD64 Rdx;
            PDWORD64 Rbx;
            PDWORD64 Rsp;
            PDWORD64 Rbp;
            PDWORD64 Rsi;
            PDWORD64 Rdi;
            PDWORD64 R8;
            PDWORD64 R9;
            PDWORD64 R10;
            PDWORD64 R11;
            PDWORD64 R12;
            PDWORD64 R13;
            PDWORD64 R14;
            PDWORD64 R15;
        } DUMMYSTRUCTNAME;
    } DUMMYUNIONNAME2;

} KNONVOLATILE_CONTEXT_POINTERS, *PKNONVOLATILE_CONTEXT_POINTERS;

#endif // _AMD64_

Unions are used so the data can be accessed by either array index or item name. For example, ctxt.IntegerContext[4] and ctxt.Rsp both refer to same piece of data - the stack pointer register.

As you can see, there are sixteen 128-bit registers saved as the floating point context and sixteen 64-bit registers saved as the integer register context in code compiled for the AMD64 architecture. In actual practice only very low level code is likely to use this data. It is for illustrative purposes only.

 

Your comment is funny as hell. Not single time I googled something related to Windows issue, tweak, bug, I came upon official MS forum without seeing robotic answers made by human from country where MS pays 1/10th of what US person would cost. And quality reflects that.

Like: Person asks for registry value which can change something. Answer: Provide us with HW configuration, crash dump, ... or we can't help you.

 

AVX 512 is utterly unnecessary on the Desktop segment.

 

Linux users are only toxic toward each other and *BSD users. Mac users are the ones toxic to everyone but their own kind.
Also, Linux has an an incredibly high market penetration, just not in the desktop space. For the last 25 years (maybe more) it wasn't built around the desktop space. So to criticize it for something it wasn't built to do is rather stupid, and toxic of you to say. Despite this, many open-source desktop environments (which are not exclusive to Linux) make for a much better desktop experience than either Mac or Windows, but there are enough people like yourself who hold onto decade-old impressions.

Linus' job is to just maintain the kernel, and he does that very well.

 

A lot of people said the same thing about AVX/AVX2 256 bit wide vectors. Developers will find a use for it, plus AVX-512 is reportedly much cleaner and better designed than previous vector instruction sets.

 

nobody will be using 512 in desktop machines.

 

You do realize that AVX-512 is already being used in x265? So if you do encoding/transcoding like many people do, there's a good chance you've used software that has been optimized for AVX-512. Also, dav1d decoder for AV1 uses AVX2 and AVX-512 as well, and so do Intel's open source SVT codecs.

I could also see a use for AVX-512 in gaming, specifically physics. Epic's Chaos physics engine is heavily optimized for SIMD using Intel's ISPC compiler, so it's feasible that more intensive physics algorithms like mass scale destruction and smoke and fluid simulation would run significantly faster on AVX-512.

 

See thread title

 

What does that have to do with what we are discussing? x265 isn't a benchmark, it's a codec, and more than likely, you yourself have used it if you've done any encoding.