Intel Nova Lake CPUs will mark the return of AVX-512, a feature that has long been abandoned by the company for its client CPUs.
AVX-512 Is Coming Back To Intel's Consumer CPUs, Starting With Nova Lake
Intel has had a love-hate relationship with AVX-512 on its consumer CPUs. The AVX-512 instruction set was last seen on Intel's Tiger Lake (11th Gen) family, and since then, the company has offered no support for it on its modern-day chips. Meanwhile, AMD has been offering AVX-512 support on its Zen 4 and Zen 5 chips, both client and server platforms.
Last year, we reported that AVX-512 was coming back to Intel's "Future" CPU families through the AVX 10.2 suite. Intel patches hinted at AVX-512 support across both Core and Xeon product lines.
With the latest Linux Kernel patches, it looks like AVX-512 support is more or less confirmed for the Intel Nova Lake lineup and future CPU families in the client segment. With this support, Intel CPUs will once again offer AVX-512 capabilities, which currently offer up to a 43% improvement on AMD's Zen 5 CPUs (Ryzen 9 9950X) versus the standard AVX instruction set:
| src_cnt | AVX | AVX512 | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 56353 MB/s | 75388 MB/s | 33% |
| 2 | 54274 MB/s | 68409 MB/s | 26% |
| 3 | 44649 MB/s | 64042 MB/s | 43% |
| 4 | 41315 MB/s | 55002 MB/s | 33% |
AVX-512 enables wider 512-bit vector operations, enabling higher performance and capabilities in certain apps & workloads.
This technology was last enabled on Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs, which were removed from the generation prior (10th Gen Comet Lake) and also the succeeding generation (12th Gen Alder Lake, 13th Gen Raptor Lake, 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh, Core Ultra Series 1 Meteor Lake, Core Ultra Series 2 Arrow Lake, & Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake).
The move was made because the newer CPUs featured two different core architectures, a P-Core and an E-Core. The P-Core supported AVX-512 instructions, but the E-Core didn't. Alder Lake did initially offer AVX-512 support, but the feature was blocked in newer updates at Intel's request to board partners.
The Intel Nova Lake CPU lineup is still using a hybrid core architecture with Coyote Cove P-Cores and Arctic Wolf E-Cores, but with AVX 10.2 ISA support, it is pretty much expected to see AVX-512 capabilities. Coral Rapids will be the first Xeon family to bring back SMT support. So AVX-512 and SMT are back on the table instead of going the Non-SMT route like Diamond Rapids.
Bringing back AVX-512 support, along with SMT, will be a huge deal for Intel, as AMD is not only offering both on their consumer/server level chips, but doing so in such an efficient way that everyone has lots of positive things to say about them. Meanwhile, Intel has been lagging, but with AVX-512 support on Nova Lake, we can see Intel return to form if it manages to reinstate faith in its consumers with stronger product families and support.
News Source: @InstLatX64
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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