Travis Downs (travis.downs.delete@this.gmail.com) on July 11, 2020 7:03 pm wrote:
>
> No! Keep up the good work adding sweet SIMD instruction sets that give you an edge
> over AMD, who have been kicking your ass in most other ways.

The thing is, those sweet SIMD instructions aren't making up for the fact that AMD has been kicking ass everywhere else...

That kind of proves my point.

> Actually put them on all your chips, not just some weird random subset so people actually use them.

.. and that's actually a (very big) part of the problem with AVX512.

I'd argue that you simply can't put it in a smaller chip. Not while actually making it worth using. It wasn't designed that way.

Some of the AVX512 parts I like: intel did make things more generic with it. I think the masking stuff is new to AVX512, no?. But that's less about the width, and more about cleaning things up and making them more useful in general.

But I think the 512-bit part is a hot mess, and I think ARM potentially did things much better with SVE2. Exactly because hopefully you can have a small and large implementation co-existing, instead of the fragmentation that is the AVX world.

Are there any actual SVE2 chips and users out that validate that point? Not that I know. I haven't really followed it. But I appreciate people trying to do it right. Maybe SVE2 won't work out well, but at least ARM tried.

Not like Intel.

I'll give kudos to Intel when they do things well, and they do do many things well (well, used to, and I'm still hoping to see the old Intel come roaring back, because it's been so depressing lately). But I'll also point out when I think they've screwed up. AVX512 and transactional memory have been bad, I think. They've been bad both from a technical standpoint, but equally importantly from that "fragmenting the market" standpoint.

Linus