Intel in a smart move has done what any company in your situation would do, and that is nothing more than disabling the AVX-512 instructions by default when the cores E-Cores are active. The reasons we thought we knew as such and although the official confirmation of the company is missing, today we have one more piece of information that could change everything.
AVX-512 at the height of overclocking
The fact that it was a rep presenting to a small regional audience doesn’t give me 100% confidence it’s a rigid policy confirmed at the highest levels, but it’s a start.
2/2
– π·π. πΌππ πΆπ’π‘πππ π (@IanCutress) November 9, 2021
In case you did not know, in the past Intel offered a specific guarantee for those users who were going to put their processors in serious trouble through high or extreme overclocking, so that they would not run out of CPU as such and after paying a small price.
Although Intel and AMD sell their processors unlocked, the warranty policies exclude techniques such as overclock, since they exceed the capacities and limitations set by both brands and logically, if the CPU suffers damage for this reason, there will be no guarantee if this reason is detected.
Well, from the hand of Dr. Ian Cutress and after the presentation and launch of Alder Lake, an Intel representative in Taiwan has slipped what could be another reason to leave your precious Core 12 CPU without guarantee: activating AVX-512 could be reason for void the processor warranty.
Why would the AVX-512 warranty void?
First of all, it must be clarified that this is not a confirmation as such, since as Ian Cutress says, he is an Intel representative at a local meeting, which could indicate that it is not a norm or policy at a global level, but … Well It is true and as we have consulted in the Intel datasheet, AVX-512 is not mentioned in any of them for Gen 12, as if it did not exist and it is that in part it is so.
Intel does not enable this feature by default and it is apparently the manufacturers who dictate that it can be activated through their firmwares and with the excuse of deactivating the E-Cores as we mentioned at the beginning. Why? Well, basically because of consumption and temperatures. AVX-512 is extremely demanding in these two areas and the Intel Core 12 processors are already fully squeezed with a PL1 = PL2 241 watts on most motherboards (this is an individual consideration of each one of them, the PL1 is 125 watts, but nobody fulfills it as such).
Therefore, if Intel detects that a CPU has died due to fault or reason to activate AVX-512, it is most likely that it will leave that processor out of warranty considering everything described above. This is something similar to what happened with AMD, Zen 1 and the FMA4 instructions, where it was shown that by launching working code for these instructions the processors worked instead of canceling the operation and AMD did not recognize it as a feature in itself and never we knew the reasons.
So in summary, if you activate AVX-512 in BIOS or disable the E-Cores and your motherboard directly activates these instructions, pray that the processor does not fail, you do not have a power outage or any problem that could leave the processor like a paperweight , because surely Intel is not going to replace it.
