Torvalds was not the only person to kick AVX-512 in the shins either. Former Intel engineer Francois Piednoel also said the special instruction simply did not belong in laptops, as the power and die space area trade-offs just are not worth it.

Intel Chief Architect Raja Koduri says their community loves it because they're seeing a huge performance boost:

"AVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community, AI community, love it," Koduri said, responding to a question from PCWorld about the AVX-512 kerfuffle during Intel's Architecture Day on August 11.

Koduri said Intel had helped customers achieve a 285X increase in performance in "our good old CPU socket" just by taking advantage of the extension.

However Koduri acknowledged some validity to Torvald's comments.

"Linus' criticism from one angle that 'hey, are there client applications that leverage this vector bit yet?' may be valid", he said.

 Koduri explained further that Intel has to maintain a hardware software contract all the way from servers to laptops, because that's been the magic of the ecosystem.

"(That's) the great thing about the x86 ecosystem, you could write a piece of software for your notebook and it could also run on the cloud", Kodori said. "That's been the power of the x86 ecosystem.”

Intel isn't going to change direction. Koduri said it will continue to lean on AVX-512 as well as other instructions.

 "We understand Linus' concerns, we understand some of the issues with first generation AVX-512 that had impact on the frequencies etc, etc", he said "and we are making it much much better with every generation".