Charlie Burnes (charlie.burnes.delete@this.no-spam.com) on May 19, 2022 2:19 pm wrote:
> anonymou5 (no.delete@this.spam.com) on May 19, 2022 9:46 am wrote:
> > > A front-end web server doesn’t need AVX-512 and AMX.
> >
> > Says who, and how many of them do "they" actually have?
> >
> > Sorry, but just because Intel's current Atom cores lack AVX512, and Intel is desperately
> > trying to sell them anyway, doesn't mean... squat.
>
> Anyone who would rather have AXV-512 and AMX in their front-end web servers instead of 4 times as many
> cores can use Granite Rapids instead of Sierra Forest. I think the real problem is that Intel does not
> provide a clean way to make new instruction set extensions run on their older processors. This is just
> laziness on Intel’s part. They could have microcode emulate the new instructions, including doing
> loads and stores to compensate for the smaller register files in the older processors. Intel already
> has the hardware to emulate instructions and they use it to fix bugs. Splintering x86 into 20+ different
> instruction sets with no backward compatibility slows down new development and makes less developers
> use the new instruction set extensions. That’s bad for everyone except x86 competitors.


I completely agree, the ISA incompatibility, together with the lack of ECC support on most consumer SKUs, are by far the most annoying things about the Intel CPUs.

The Intel line of products has become much worse from this point of view than the IBM System/360 series was, more than a half of century ago, even if that series spanned an even greater range of prices and performances.