While we can’t forget that these P-Cores are nothing more than the Golden Cove cores that the Xeon Sapphire Rapids will also be using, so there has to be a way to enable the use of the AVX-512 instructions on Intel Core 12.
AVX-512 instructions on Intel Core 12?
Yes, it is possible to activate it, but it involves a payment which is none other than the deactivation of the low power cores or E-Cores, which according to Intel can be done in order to be able to overclock the P-Cores. , but this In this case it is used to activate the units to execute the AVX-512 instructions on Intel Core 12.
Since it is possible to enable and disable any number of cores in the Intel Core 12 through BIOS and easily as you can see in the pictures above. That is, we can turn them off so that the energetic power goes to the active cores, but oddly enough once we turn off the E-Colors on newer Intel processors, this is when the AVX-512 is automatically enabled for use in the P-Colors.
This turns the Intel Core 12 into a miniature Sapphire Rapids, so as you can see this is a step up not only for the Xeon server processors, but also against the CPUs for HEDT they are brewing.
Performance and consumption
Y-Cruncher is a benchmark that helps us measure performance when executing AVX-512 instructions on an Intel CPU and it’s interesting how the Intel Core 12s with the Alder Lake-S architecture have evolved in this regard. regard to the previous one. generation.
Specifically, two 12th generation processors were tested, the i9-12900K with 8 P-Core and the i5-12600K with six cores. Compared to the fact that the AVX-512 unit is not active, both are a 30% faster and the more modest of the two barely outperforms the i9-11900K in terms of performance.
The counterpart of the increased performance comes from the increased consumption, which is normal in any SIMD unit, since a large amount of data is being moved simultaneously at the same time. Let’s not forget that it is much more expensive to move data than to process it and especially if one has to move a huge SIMD instruction with 512 bits of data from the main RAM of the system.
This is why the consumption of the Intel Core 12 with the AVX-512 active is higher, with the possibility of reaching the 146.2 W in the case of the i5-12600K and 231.8W on the i9-12900K. In any case, they do not exceed their figures in PL2 mode, which is at the same time curious, which does not happen in the case of the i9-11900K where the use of these instructions increases consumption to the figure of 314.2W. All of this is a testament to Intel’s excellent work with its new architecture and the use of the Intel 7 node.
Ideal for PlayStation 3 emulator
Accelerate the emulation towards the SPE units of the architecture PS3 Cell Broadband Engine, the creators of the RPSC3 emulator use the AVX-512 instructions, so the fact that we can enable them in the new Intel processor family is the key to the emulation, yes, as we have seen before, that assumes to have the CPU in PL2 Mode most of the time, but consumption is much lower than with the Intel Core 11.
In any case, at the PC level, it is expected that in the years to come a good part of the functions of the AVX-512 will be found in specialized units which do the same job with a much lower consumption. and without much complexity on the chip. Not to mention the adoption of the AMX box to solve some problems. Either way, for software compatibility, the AVX-512 will still be there.
