Although we cannot forget that said P-Cores are nothing other than the Golden Cove cores that the Xeon Sapphire Rapids will also use, so there has to be a way to activate the use of the AVX-512 instructions in Intel Core 12.
AVX-512 Instructions on Intel Core 12?
Yes, it is possible to activate it, but this entails a payment that is none other than deactivating the low energy consumption cores or E-Cores, something that according to Intel can be done to be able to overclock the P-Cores, but that In this case, it is used to activate the units to execute AVX-512 instructions on Intel Core 12.
Since it is possible to activate and deactivate any number of cores in the Intel Core 12 through the BIOS and easily as you can see in the images above. That is, we can turn them off so that the energy power goes to the cores that are active, but curiously once we have deactivated the E-Cores on newer Intel CPUs this is when the AVX-512 is automatically activated for use in the P-Cores.
This turns the Intel Core 12 into a miniature Sapphire Rapids, so as you can see it is an advance not only for the Xeon processors for servers, but also for the CPUs for HEDT that they are preparing.
Performance and consumption
Y-Cruncher is a benchmark that helps us measure the performance when executing the AVX-512 instructions on an Intel CPU and it is interesting to know how the Intel Core 12 with Alder Lake-S architecture have evolved in this regard. compared to the previous generation.
Specifically, two 12th-generation processors have been tested, the i9-12900K with 8 P-Core cores and the i5-12600K with six cores. Compared to not having the AVX-512 unit active, both are a 30% faster and the more modest of the two comes close to outperforming the i9-11900K in performance.
The counterpart to the increase in performance comes from the increase in consumption, which is normal in any SIMD unit, since a large amount of data is 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 we have to move a huge SIMD instruction with 512 bits of data from the main RAM of the system.
That is why the consumption of the Intel Core 12 with the AVX-512 active is higher, with the ability to reach the 146.2W 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, something that does not happen in the case of the i9-11900K where the use of these instructions raises the consumption to the figure of 314.2W. All of this testifies to Intel’s excellent work with its new architecture and the use of the Intel 7 node.
Ideal for the PlayStation 3 emulator
To speed up emulation to architecture SPE units PS3 Cell Broadband Engine, the creators of the RPSC3 emulator make use of the AVX-512 instructions, so the fact that we can activate them in the new family of Intel processors is key for emulation, yes, as we have seen before this supposes having to the CPU in PL2 mode most of the time, but the consumptions are much lower than with the Intel Core 11.
In any case, at the PC level, it is expected that in the coming years a good part of the functions that the AVX-512 does will end up in specialized units that do the same job with a much lower consumption and without much complexity on the chip. Not to mention the adoption of the AMX unit to solve certain problems. In any case, for software compatibility the AVX-512 will always be there.
