18 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020NEWS WHAT’S WRONG WITH INTEL?
Incidentally, Piednoël left Intel in 2017 after
serving as a principal engineer and
performance architect for 20 years, working
on CPUs from the Pentium III to the 6th-gen
Core i7. The outspoken engineer often made
technical presentations and demonstration
pitches to the hardware press, passionately
arguing why design decisions made by Intel
were the right decisions.
Piednoël admitted his information on Intel
is essentially “obsolete” and years out of date.
That also lets him speak freely as nothing he
spoke of was from information obtained
under an NDA, he said. Instead, his analysis
was mostly based on public information that’s
been swirling around Intel.
The entire video is worth a watch for
enthusiasts, but we’ve highlighted his most
intriguing claims here.AVX512 IS A MISTAKE
AVX512 is the basis of the DL Boost AI
acceleration Intel uses in its Xeon server CPUs,
and the technology has found its way into
consumer chips such as the 10th-gen Ice Lake
laptop CPU. Piednoël flat-out dismissed
including AVX512 in consumer chips as a
mistake.
“You had Skylake and Skylake X for a
reason,” Piednoël said. “AVX512 is designed
for a race of throughput that is lost to the GPU
already. There’s two ways to get throughput.
One is to get the throughput by having larger
vectors to your core, and the other way is to
have more cores.”
Piednoël, who once told me after Intel’s
Pentium 4 misadventure that “we learned you
can’t recompile the world,” seemed to imply
the software game wasn’t winning Intel any
battle this time either.
“The state of software out there is
really not favoring going larger
vectors,” Piednoël said in the video.
“In fact, you can see clearly in
Cinebench for example—that is not
one of my favorite benchmarks,
especially for a laptop where it
doesn’t make any sense—but you can
see that AMD is winning the battle of
throughput. It’s because they have
more cores and they can afford to
have more cores.”
For Piednoël, who basically made a
living for two decades slam dunking onJamming AVX512 functions into a laptop CPU like this 10th-
gen Ice Lake CPU is a mistake, a former Intel engineer said.