Please do not require AVX support for your software
pavel.network
Please do not require AVX support for your software
1–10 of 54 posts
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#2[dead]
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#3Apple switched to Apple Silicon precisely because Intel was dragging it's feet on acceleration and by doing so could fire customers like you.
Seriously though, Intel has not been good at keeping all of its chips up to date with AVX and one consequence of that is that developers don't use it at all or they use a version that is 10 years out of date. If you look at those graphs in the article, single thread performance really is dying out there, the one thing Intel could offer to make their newer offering compelling is the latest version of AVX but they have been so hypnotized by smartphones that they just had to make a "big-little" clone that disable the most advanced AVX on the good cores so the weak cores not only waste your money, time and power, but actually sap performance from your strong cores. Customers buy AMD or Apple Silicon instead. Intel and their paid shills in the tech media will make as many excuses for this as AMZN will for why you can only get 5 day shipping with Prime, but all it means is 20 years from now some people will remember Intel the way we remember Sears or Atari or AMC.
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#4This is, at its core a software distribution problem. Windows, Linux distros, etc. must have a way wherein the OS requests to download a more optimized version of the package.
I think this is most easily fixed for Linux distros, all it takes is for them to create a new architecture, say amd64_avx, which only contains packages with avx optimizations enabled where applicable.
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#5If anyone is interested, Intel has its own Linux distribution called Clear Linux which has all optimizations enabled. Of course this has the issue of not running on systems which cannot support all these optimizations, in particular, very few chips have AVX512 unless you have the latest 11th and 12th gen Intel CPUs.
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#6This is, at its core a software distribution problem. Windows, Linux distros, etc. must have a way wherein the OS requests to download a more optimized version of the package. I think this is most easily fixed for Linux distros, all it takes is for them to create a new architecture, say amd64_avx, which only contains packages with avx optimizations enabled where applicable.
One complication is that AVX is not one but more than a dozen ISA extensions each of which may or may not be implemented on a particular processor. This means software delivered to a customer should ideally check CPUID at runtime to dispatch the appropriate processing kernel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#7This is, at its core a software distribution problem. Windows, Linux distros, etc. must have a way wherein the OS requests to download a more optimized version of the package. I think this is most easily fixed for Linux distros, all it takes is for them to create a new architecture, say amd64_avx, which only contains packages with avx optimizations enabled where applicable.
One complication is that AVX is not one but more than a dozen ISA extensions each of which may or may not be implemented on a particular processor. This means software delivered to a customer should ideally check CPUID at runtime to dispatch the appropriate processing kernel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512
I also want to point out that there’s also the extreme-crazy option that is Gentoo linux.
All packages are distributed as source and compiled on the destination machine before being installed there. And yes, you can modify build flags per package to enable/disable compile flags.
I recommend doing it for fun. It’s a crazy world.
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#8FWIW, the 'AVX' CPU feature is part of the x86-64-v3 level of the x86-64 microarchitecture standard [0].
There are chips produced in 2015 that are only supporting x86-64-v2 [0]. Also, according to [1], "The new server-class CPUs released in 2020 [2] do not implement the AVX instruction set."
FWIW2, RedHat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL9) requires x86-64-v2 or newer [1]. So, as a reference, they decided to not yet require support for AVX.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...
[1] https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2021/01/05/building-red-h...
[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/pro...
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#9If anyone is interested, Intel has its own Linux distribution called Clear Linux which has all optimizations enabled. Of course this has the issue of not running on systems which cannot support all these optimizations, in particular, very few chips have AVX512 unless you have the latest 11th and 12th gen Intel CPUs.
Wasn’t avx-512 disabled rather shortly after alderlakes release?
Re: Please do not require AVX support for your software
#10This is, at its core a software distribution problem. Windows, Linux distros, etc. must have a way wherein the OS requests to download a more optimized version of the package. I think this is most easily fixed for Linux distros, all it takes is for them to create a new architecture, say amd64_avx, which only contains packages with avx optimizations enabled where applicable.
One complication is that AVX is not one but more than a dozen ISA extensions each of which may or may not be implemented on a particular processor. This means software delivered to a customer should ideally check CPUID at runtime to dispatch the appropriate processing kernel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512
If someone just says "AVX" they usually mean AVX(1). And that's what the article is discussing.
AVX-512 forking into tons of different beasts is a separate, but related, problem. But it's more like how SSE2, 3, 4, 4.1 and so on existed.
Sometimes people said "SSE" and they might have meant one the later versions, but I don't hear the same statement with AVX, since people very explicitly seem to say AVX2 and AVX512.