Comment by fweimer
5 hours ago
Wide (especially unconditional) use of AVX-512 faces two main issues today: There's no public commitment from Intel to phase out CPUs that don't support it. And some emulation-adjacent tools (the prime example is valgrind) do not support it.
The latter could at least be solved with some community effort, although the relevant set of instructions is quite large. It's also not specific to AVX-512. Any comparable vector ISA faces the same challenge.
"some community effort" is a huge understatement. Let me rephrase that for you: "Possibly the largest ever single contribution to Valgrind".
Initial work on this was started by an engineer at Intel. She was based in St Petersburg so that work stalled in 2022. Here is the bugzilla item https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383010. The other big issue is that we don't have enough people working on Valgrind that are experts with the virtual CPU. There are a couple of guys working on s390 and a little bit of work is being done reusing amd64 sse4 support on x86. I dabble a little bit on arm64,
If there are any AVX512 experts that would like to help with this it would be most welcome.
> There's no public commitment from Intel to phase out CPUs that don't support it.
They dropped the idea of having AVX10 variants that don't support the full thing, and as of Nova Lake even the E cores will have it. Is there a significant risk it doesn't get into all products starting soon?