Interestingly, even though Intel has been pushing AVX-512 for years, on the 12th Gen Core desktop processors, the company disabled this power-hungry feature with a subsequent microcode update.
Unexpectedly,AMDInstead, it chose to provide the AVX-512 instruction set on the Zen 4 Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors.
As for LLVMpipie, it is a unique Mesa OpenGL soft solution. When the computer system cannot find the graphics card hardware/GPU driver, the LLVMpipe solution based on the CPU soft solution can be selected.
However, compared to the Ryzen 7000’s integrated RNDA 2-core display, the advantages of the soft solution are obviously not as significant as expected – even if AMD uses a 256-bit (instead of 512-bit) path.
It is reported that LLVM is “a collection of compiler/toolchain technologies for creating a front-end for any programming language and a back-end for any instruction set architecture”.
LLVMpipe will allow LLVM to use a specific set of extensions and provide higher performance than executables from other software software such as Softpipe / OpenGL.
Screenshot (from:FreeDesktop）
It is unclear how much performance AVX-512 can provide on the new AMD Zen 4 architecture, and the merge request includes an environment variable called “GALLIUM_OVERRIDE_CPU_CAPS”.
This variable can override CPU capabilities in Softpipie and LLVMpipe to disable or enable AVX, SSE, and other instruction set features.
Finally, “LP_NATIVE_VECTOR_WIDTH” will allow changing the vector bit width to use AVX, AVX2, or AVX-512 in LLVMpipe.