Fed up with workarounds
Intel has decided to fuse off AVX-512 on Alder Lake products.
A Chipzilla spokesperson told Toms Hardware that although AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to fuse off in the future.
When Intel launched its 12th Gen range in November AVX-512 wasn’t enabled. Intel said it wasn’t enabled due to the inclusion of two different architectures. The E cores didn’t support it, even if the P cores did.
However, Motherboard manufacturers worked out a way to allow users to enable AVX-512 after disabling the E cores. Intel obviously didn’t like that and so it issued new BIOS microcode to close off this loophole. MSI released a BIOS that got around the block which led to Intel’s decision to fuse off AVX-512 in silicon.
It means that there will be no more workarounds to enable AVX-512 support. You might get away if it if you use an earlier batch 12th Gen CPU and don’t update your BIOS, but in a month or two or three from now, all 12th Gen stock will have AVX-512 blocked off completely.
AVX-512 instructions can result in dramatic performance gains. Linux creator Linus Torvalds, hate it because it creates excessive power consumption and heat generation.
