I can't even begin to imagine the kind of corporate dysfunction that leads to, first, at long last introducing the biggest change in the instruction set since the Haswell era into the consumer CPU line, slowly getting some actual adoption on that, and then suddenly dropping it altogether (for rather dubious reasons), but actually not really, so random motherboard vendors get to re-enable it behind your back.
This is crazy, both in terms of CPU design and just basic communication. Personally, I'll be waiting out this generation until I see AMD's response. Taking AVX-512 seriously is even harder than it already was.
Wouldn't it be possible for a process to ask to be pinned to a specific CPU core, or the OS to handle programs with extra tags indicating their ISA requirements, so that it could restrict the scheduling to those cores matching the requirements?
About a decade ago, as an intern helping research this, I developed an app to manually tag processes as "big core only" or "little core only" etc. This was for the QuickIA[0], which had a Xeon in one socket and an Atom in the other. It was fun to kick off a gigantic compression task and watch the "expected time to completion" progress bar change dramatically when you migrated the process between sockets.
You all would probably find the "QuickIA Software Support" section interesting, they go through a few issues you run into when you have incompatible micro architectures running in a single system. It also might help illuminate where Intel's head was at during the early research phase of creating a heterogeneous processor.
That's what people generally expected when the whole P-core vs E-core on different microarchitectures design was announced. Instead of going for this, Intel went out of their way to state that there would be no AVX-512 even on P-cores and that's that. Ignoring this obvious solution is part of why I'm so flabbergasted at the situation.
Then they can just say so and spin it as a PR win - "look how security conscious we are these days". Very publicly removing a formerly-headline feature with no explanation and then even failing at that is just mind boggling.
I decided to search for SMP, which stands for Symetric Multi Processing, to verify its definition. This acronym is used for hardware sporting several identical CPUs, which is what we've seen so far in the x86 world.
The opposite is called AMP, for Asymetric Multi Processing. The Wikipedia article on the subject describes several OS level strategies to handle that sort of hardware.
Linus tech tips also showed this CPU almost can't be cooled. Even with the best air cooler that is better then some water cooling setups it hit 90+ degrees. This doesn't spell well for the mobile CPUs of this gen. Intel is already greatly exceeding thermal envelope on mobile CPUs for a few gens.
I think there are some issues with temperature readings on ADL. A lot of software showcases 100C with only 3 P-cores loaded, but even with all cores loaded, the CPU doesn't de-clock at that temp. My MSI AIO has a temperature display, and it only showed 75C at load. I've got questions out in a few places - I think Intel switched some of the thermal monitoring stuff inside and people are polling the wrong things. Other press are showing 100C quite easily too. I'm asking MSI how their AIO had 75C at load, but I'm still waiting on an answer. An ASUS rep said that 75-80C should be normal under load. So why everything is saying 100C I have no idea.
Is the i7 dead at this point? Ars' review focused mostly on the i5 and i9, and both of them showed good progress. Is there a reason to go for an i7 now? If I want power, I just go straight for an i9 or AMD, and if I want something more budget, the I go for i5. Does the slight performance increase between the i5 and i7 make it much more of an option?
So still solidly entrenched in the second era of Netburst.
So Intel is chasing AMD...But AMD is actually chasing Apple now. So Intel has two frogs to jump this time.
AMD has a real opportunity at long term strategic victory in computing. If they can be the leader in a mass shift of the Windows/PC ecosystem in an ISA change to ARM then Intel might be toast.
Let's say AMD gets a near-M1 chip out quickly with the same gee-whiz battery life out 18 months before Intel, and can produce them at a cost the Intel's business people sniff at because they are so fat on margins, even now.
And servers and laptops swarm the market such that it becomes an inevitability that mainstream PC/Servers will go ARM as the dominant ISA.
Intel will be in deep trouble.
It also would be an opportunity for Apple to dominate the PC market with OSX by making a more general-hardware OS, but they won't do that.
And of course it is YET ANOTHER opportunity by desktop Linux to gain a foothold, but at this point it's more likely that Android or an evolved Windows-that-is-99% linux becomes that.
I can't even begin to imagine the kind of corporate dysfunction that leads to, first, at long last introducing the biggest change in the instruction set since the Haswell era into the consumer CPU line, slowly getting some actual adoption on that, and then suddenly dropping it altogether (for rather dubious reasons), but actually not really, so random motherboard vendors get to re-enable it behind your back.
This is crazy, both in terms of CPU design and just basic communication. Personally, I'll be waiting out this generation until I see AMD's response. Taking AVX-512 seriously is even harder than it already was.