Intel to hardware disable AVX-512 support on Alder Lake CPUs – Computer – News

Intel will hardware disable AVX-512 support in new revisions of its Alder Lake processors. The company confirms this to Tom’s Hardware. AVX-512 was officially not supported on the chips, but was usable on Alder Lake via a detour.

An anonymous source reported to Tom’s Hardware that AVX-512 has been completely disabled in newer releases of Intel’s Alder Lake non-K processors. This was subsequently confirmed by Intel. “Although AVX-512 does not fuse-disabled was on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to do so on Alder Lake products in the future,” a company spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware.

With this, AVX-512 is now hardware disabled by Intel, by blowing an internal fuse on Alder Lake CPUs. Previously, AVX-512 was already software disabled. When introducing Alder Lake, Intel said that AVX-512 was not supported due to the hybrid architecture of the CPUs, with two different types of cores. However, several motherboard manufacturers introduced a workaround to enable AVX-512, in the form of a bios setting that disabled Alder Lakes E-cores.

In January, Intel already came up with an updated microcode, which was provided via bios updates and rolled back this workaround. MSI then came up with an option to easily switch between old and new bios versions, allowing users to re-enable support, writes Tom’s Hardware† So in the future, users will need to have an old BIOS version and an older Alder Lake chip to deploy AVX-512.

AVX-512 is an instruction set extension from Intel, which is primarily intended to accelerate professional workloads such as 3D modeling, scientific simulations, deep learning, and audio and video processing. The extension was supported on Intel’s previous Rocket Lake consumer processors as well as on Xeon workstation CPUs and high-performance computing.

It is not known why Intel disables AVX-512. The company may want to create more distinction between its forthcoming Sapphire Rapids server platform and its consumer Alder Lake chips, as AVX-512 can offer performance benefits especially for enterprise applications. However, it has not been confirmed whether this is indeed the reason.

–