News Linus Torvalds Wishes Intel's AVX-512 A Painful Death

[Admin]

Linux creator Linus Torvalds shares his strong views on AVX-512.

Linus Torvalds Wishes Intel's AVX-512 A Painful Death : Read more

 

[PCWarrior]

Says a person who also doesn’t care about GPU acceleration. He considers these kind of things “only relevant to HPC”. As if the HPC market is small and not where all the money is atm. And who writes code for HPC Mr Linus? Isn’t it the same people who also use more consumer/prosumer-oriented hardware at home or at office? Don’t they code first on such hardware and then they run it on the big supercomputer? Linus seems to be either stack in the past or he is simply too narrow-minded these days and only cares about what he is personally involved with.

 

[jkflipflop98]

This guy is a moron.

Maybe Linus should get back to dallying about with his crappy operating system he literally can't give away for free and leave chip architecture to the real engineers.

 

[InvalidError]

Don’t they code first on such hardware and then they run it on the big supercomputer? Linus seems to be either stack in the past or he is simply too narrow-minded these days and only cares about what he is personally involved with.

Well, Linus was mostly a kernel developer and kernel stuff has little to no use for FP and high-volume math in general. With the amount of AI and AI-derived stuff making its way to the consumer market, having a decent amount of low-latency FP8/12/16 performance may become very much necessary even for normal people a few more years from now.

 

[jwgrace1]

As a dabbler in X86 Assembly code, I would love to have access to AVX512 instructions that can clear large memory blocks quickly, that can do exclusive or's, and a few other similar 512 bit wide instructions efficiently. But I do not use other parts of the code at this time. I appreciate Linus Torvalds comments in at least one way. These commands do take more energy slowing down clock speeds etc. but I expect that over time these problems would get resolved. I do wish the 512bit registers could be used just as the 64 bit registers, so that I could get single instruction 128x128 bit or 256 x 256 bit or 512 x 512 bit multiplications, or any other of the integer arithmetic instructions. (I have an interest in complexity theory where such arithmetic would be useful.) In fact my dream is to have a cpu that we would call x86-512 on the internal side and have its minimal io be64 bitds as at present but expandable to 128 bit data bus, then 256 bit data bus, then 512 bit data bus as technology can efficiently deal with those requirements. Oh well, perhaps never to be, but it is fun to dream of.