Intel to hardware disable AVX-512 support on Alder Lake CPUs

Intel will hardware disable AVX-512 support in new revisions of its Alder Lake processors. The company confirms this to Tom’s Hardware. AVX-512 was already officially not supported on the chips, but was usable on Alder Lake via a roundabout way.

An anonymous source reported to Tom’s Hardware that AVX-512 has been completely disabled in newer releases of Intel’s Alder Lake non-K processors. This was subsequently confirmed by Intel. “While AVX-512 was not fuse-disabled on certain early Alder Lake desktop products, Intel plans to do so on Alder Lake products in the future,” a company spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware.

With this, AVX-512 is now hardware disabled by Intel, by blowing an internal fuse on Alder Lake CPUs. Previously, AVX-512 was already software disabled. When introducing Alder Lake, Intel said that AVX-512 was not supported due to the hybrid architecture of the CPUs, with two different types of cores. However, several motherboard manufacturers introduced a workaround to enable AVX-512, in the form of a bios setting that disabled Alder Lakes E-cores.

In January, Intel already released an updated microcode, which was provided via bios updates, and reversed this workaround. MSI then came up with an option to easily switch between old and new bios versions, allowing users to re-enable support, writes Tom’s Hardware. So in the future, users will need to have an old BIOS version and an older Alder Lake chip to deploy AVX-512.

AVX-512 is an instruction set extension from Intel, which is primarily intended to accelerate professional workloads such as 3D modeling, scientific simulations, deep learning, and audio and video processing. The extension was supported on Intel’s previous Rocket Lake consumer processors, as well as on Xeon workstation and high-performance computing CPUs.