Comment by dragontamer
15 hours ago
I mean, eventually yeah.
I like Zen5 as much as the next guy, but it should be noted that even today's most recent version of Blender is AVX (256-bit) only. That means E-cores remain the optimal core to work with for a lot of Blender stuff.
Hopefully AMD Zen5 AVX512 becomes more popular. Maybe it'd become more popular as Intel rolls out AVX10 (somewhat compatible instruction set)
Would blender benefit from the bits of AVX-512 other than the width? I would think the approximate sqrt instructions might be useful.
AVX512 is one of the best instruction sets I've seen. No joke.
There's all kinds of things AVX512 would help out in Blender. But those ways are incompatible with older AVX2 or SSE code. The question is if Blender will be willing to support SSE, AVX, and AVX512 code paths. Each new codepath is more maintenance and more effort.
AVX512 has more registers: not just 32x 512-bit registers (AVX normally has 16x 256-bit registers), but also the kmask registers (64-bits that take the place of old boolean logic that used to be done on the 256-bit registers). This alone should give far more optimizations for the compiler to automatically find.
There's also VPCOMPRESSB and VPEXPANDB, Conflict-detection, and other instructions that make new SIMD data-structures far more efficient to implement. But this requires deep understanding that very few programmers have yet.