[topspin]

He has the history correct. Most of the CPUs that x86 beat in the market had superior FP performance; SPARCs, Alphas, PA-RISC, Itanium, etc.

> When's the last time he actually did anything with a computer?

According to Linus he completes about 30 pull requests a day. Some multiple of that in kernel builds. His $1900 32 core Threadripper speeds that process a great deal and FP contributes little to nothing.

Today people stream video+audio, encrypt+decrypt and render graphics. All of these have specialized silicon. If their AVX-512 vanished in the night almost no one would notice the next day.

Maybe we should all be astronomers and thermodynamicists writing bespoke finite element simulations and have a deep appreciation for the wonders of floating point ISAs, but that's just not the real world.

[azalemeth]

Speaking as someone who does scientific computing all day long, in part with FEM simulations, even for me AVX512 isn't usually worth it in terms of wall-clock time.

[sgillen]

Speaking as someone else who does scientific computing all day, taking away vectorized operations would kill my performance completely.

[CamperBob2]

Yes, it's pretty much useless, and Linus's reasoning will guarantee that things stay that way.

[TinkersW]

They wouldn't notice AVX512 vanishing because they never had it in the first place, as Intel hasn't shipped it in CPU people actually use for those tasks--just servers and random laptops.

As for the rest, you are wrong, AVX/512 is not just floating point by any means, and floating point is used by more than just scientific workloads.

Games/simulations/modeling software etc all can make heavy use of floating point.