>How fast does the CPU step up and down the throttling caused by AVX-512?
It's actually really, really slow. On newer (I think around Skylake-X, which is when AVX-512 was introduced) CPUs it takes up to 500 microseconds i.e. millions of cycles to activate AVX-512. This can't really be made faster because they actually need to give the voltage regulators time to adjust or the chip literally brows out. During this time AVX-512 instructions execute on the AVX-256 datapath¹.
Once AVX-512 is activated the clock of that core is reduced by about 25% and it starts a 2ms timer which is reset whenever another AVX-512 instruction is issued. AFAIK Intel doesn't say how long it takes to raise the frequency again once the timer expires.
(This is something of a simplification because there are actually two AVX power licenses, the first allowing AVX-256 and a limited set² of AVX-512 instructions, reducing clock by about 15%, and the second allowing everything. Also, executing a single AVX-512 instruction doesn't immediately request a higher power license, you have to execute a certain number of them.)
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This is actually the better version. On Haswell executing any AVX-256 instruction would reduce the frequency of every core by about 15-20%. But hey, at least it only takes about 150k cycles to activate (not much of a consolation, I know). Beats me how long it stays throttled for.
(I don't know what exactly Broadwell did. I don't think it throttled all cores, but it didn't have the additional power license with reduced throttling that Skylake has.)
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¹ Or the 128-bit datapath if the core is at the lowest power license (which still lets you use 128-bit SSE instructions, and basic AVX-256 instructions).
² Basically anything that doesn't execute on the floating-point unit, which means no floating point and no integer multiplication (which uses the FPU). This is actually kinda the saving grace of the whole thing, since it means you can vectorize things like memcmp and strlen without requiring the highest power license.
