Intel AVX10 ISA To Feature AVX-512 Instructions With Support on Both P-Cores & E-Cores

Jul 24, 2023 at 04:25pm EDT
Intel AVX10 ISA To Feature AVX-512 Instructions With Support on Both P-Cores & E-Cores 1

Intel's upcoming AVX10 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) has been detailed and comes with AVX-512 support for both P-Cores & E-Cores.

Intel AVX10 ISA Could Be Chipzilla's Big Gun Against AMD, Features AVX-512 Support on Both P-Cores & E-Cores

In a slide published by Twitterati, Longhorn, we get to see details of Intel's upcoming AVX10 ISA that seems to be coming in two versions, a pre-enablement (AVX10.1) and a post-enablement (AVX10.2). Both ISAs have one major addition which is support for optional 512-bit FP/int which is something that was excluded from recent client chips. The Intel AVX-512 ISA has been around for a while with Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake but the company decided to disable it from the most recent client-tier chips such as Alder Lake and Raptor Lake.

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Image Credits: Longhorn

But it looks like Intel might be bringing these instructions back with processors that support the AVX 10 ISA. According to the pre and post-enablement details, the AVX10 ISA is part of the latest APX (Advanced Performance Extensions) and will offer:

Now it's not like AVX-512 has entirely disappeared. The support for the instructions still exists on the HPC side with the Xeon chips. However, the client side might just bring AVX-512 instructions back since AMD is already offering it on its Ryzen 7000 consumer processors and they have shown some impressive performance capabilities in specific workloads without taking a big hit on power consumption. Power consumption was a major concern with Intel's previous AVX-512 instructions.

Intel AVX10 represents a major shift to supporting a high-performance vector ISA across future Intel processors. It allows the developer to maintain a single code-path that achieves high performance across all Intel platforms with the minimum of overhead checking for feature support. Future development of the Intel AVX10 ISA will continue to provide a rich, flexible, and consistent environment that optimally supports both Server and Client products.

via Intel

Also, the pre-enablement AVX10.1 version only lists down AVX-512 support for the P-Cores while the AVX10.2 version adds E-Cores too. There were already reports that Intel might be bringing AVX-512 back to client chips in some shape and form in the future. In addition to the previously stated usability benefits, several additional performance-based benefits of Intel AVX10 include:

The company has Meteor Lake for clients, and Granite Rapids & Sierra Forest for its HPC customers. All three families utilize a similar architecture with the P-Cores using Redwood Cove cores and the E-Cores based on the Crestmont architecture. Intel has stated that its future Xeon processors, codenamed Granite Rapids, will be the first to be compatible with AVX10 & will mark the transition from AVX-512 to Intel AVX10 (won't include 256-bit vector extensions). Expect more information in the future.

About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.

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