News Intel BIOS Ups Officially Disable Alder Lake's AVX-512 Capabilities

[Admin]

Intel has officially disabled AVX-512 functionality completely with a new microcode up.

Intel BIOS Ups Officially Disable Alder Lake's AVX-512 Capabilities : Read more

 

[-Fran-]

Is there a performance penalty to disabling AVX512 via microcode?

Regards.

 

[Tech0000]

I guess there will be an opportunity to mod all new bios with uCode 5 using UBU (about a few minutes worth of work per BIOS). Not a big deal. Pathetic attempt by Intel to kneecap their new CPUs to create artificial differentiation.

 

[Tech0000]

Is there a performance penalty to disabling AVX512 via microcode?

Regards.

Yes, In certain workloads there is a penalty. Looks like Intel actually got AVX512 right in the golden cove. See other Tomshardware article for bechmark details... https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-reportedly-kills-avx-512-alder-lake-cpus

 

[PCWarrior]

Is there a performance penalty to disabling AVX512 via microcode?

There is no performance penalty from the new microcode per se. Of course, if you are one of the few people that bought an i9 12900K and then went to the BIOS and disabled all the E-cores and enabled AVX-512 (something possible on a few vendors' motherboards only) you will obviously lose the capability of utilising AVX-512. AVX-512 is currently only utilised by a handful of workloads, one of them being y-cruncher. Benchmarks on y cruncher show that 8 P-cores (with AVX 512 disabled) + 8 E-cores is around 12% slower than 8 P-cores (with AVX512 enabled) + 0 E-cores (remember you have to disable all the E-cores in order to be able to enable AVX-512). That also correlates well with the PS3 emulation results (68FPS Vs 78FPS) mentioned above.

 

[JamesJones44]

I really don't understand this move. I'm not a fanboy of either company, give me the best at the best price. However, this reeks of Intel taking away a feature to later upsell with a workstation class setup where it magically reappears. Maybe there is an issue with it, but thus far, people who have enabled it haven't reported any issues and Intel's silence on it makes it even more questionable as to the reason why.

 

[Krotow]

The real question is - are AVX-512 disabling outside virtual pissing contest benchmark utilities will cripple performance in more useful real aplications and games?

 

[TerryLaze]

I really don't understand this move. I'm not a fanboy of either company, give me the best at the best price. However, this reeks of Intel taking away a feature to later upsell with a workstation class setup where it magically reappears. Maybe there is an issue with it, but thus far, people who have enabled it haven't reported any issues and Intel's silence on it makes it even more questionable as to the reason why.

They cut off avx-512 and limited avx2 to 5.1Ghz so the trend is pretty clear, they have to enforce their power draw and cooling designs, most likely because people where abusing them, mobo makers are pushing too much power into the CPUs and reviewers use "out of the box" as an excuse to push the CPU.

At some point intel has to cut their losses here, they always advertised alder as not having avx-512 so they are not taking anything away from people that they payed for.