Linus Torvalds, the Mr. Grumpy of the computing world, wished a "painful death" to Intel's AVX-512 instruction set, but Raja Koduri, Intel's Mr. Charisma, PCWorld's Gordon Ma Ng, Mr. Lovely defended this instruction set in the face of questions from I'll stop now, lest I be pursued by Roger Hargreaves' heirs.

In July, Torvalds was hanging out in a forum thread speculating about the possibility of AVX-512 not being included in the upcoming Intel Alder Lake platform, and he blasted the feature, telling Intel, "We make benchmarks that we can look good with He called on Intel to start "fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to make them look good.

At this month's Intel Architecture Day, PCWorld asked Koduri about Torvalds' comments: "AVX-512 is a great feature; AVX-512 is a great feature; AVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community and AI community love it. Our customers on the data center side really, really, really like it."

"We understand Linus' concerns," Koduri continued.

"We understand some of the issues with the first generation AVX-512 that affected frequencies, etc., and we are doing much better with each successive generation."

One of the main problems Torvalds has with this instruction set is that if something needs to be accessed, the processor has to drop its clock speed to compensate. Basically, it's a performance hit, but given that it's only found in Intel's Xeon chips, Ice Lake laptops, and HPC X-series processors, it's not something to worry about.

AVX-512 is a floating-point accelerator, but it is rarely used in gaming because floating-point operations are typically handled by the GPU; AVX-512 is primarily used for scientific simulations, financial analysis, AI, and deep learning, so we PC gamers can basically We PC gamers can basically just sit back and enjoy this computing version of celebrity deathmatch.

To be fair, Torvalds admits that much of his hatred of floating point benchmarks (a tool used to highlight AVX-512's performance) is irrational and that his comments are "half-jokingly" exaggerated. But only half. I take a rather extreme position, and I know that my hatred is not really rational, but merely a personal quirk, a rant of pure unadulterated opinion."