Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Arkanosis 1476 days ago
Pushing them out of the CPU, I don't know, but some SIMD instruction sets on some CPUs have side effects that can negatively affect the performance of other operations. For example, the use of AVX2 / AVX-512 can cause some Intel CPUs to lower their base frequency, thus reducing the performance of simultaneous operations that are not using SIMD.
1 comments

Is that still true? I was under the impression that post-Haswell CPUs don’t have that particular issue.
Not for recent hardware - Ice Lake eliminated the throttling on 256b ops (they already didn't exist for certain 256b ops and all smaller ops), and reduced the throttling to almost nothing for 512b ops. Rocket Lake eliminated the throttling for 512b ops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions#Dow...

They do use a lot of power (and as a result, generate a lot of heat), so they can still cause thermal throttling, or throttling due to power limits - but there's no more "AVX offset"