Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and Intel® AVX-512
Traditionally, demanding workloads such as AI, HPC, analytics, and networking require sizable investments in specialized hardware and discrete accelerators to deliver performance and results. And while this approach allows many organizations to meet performance demands, it can create cost and scalability issues that prevent complete success.
To help make advanced workloads simpler and more cost efficient to deploy, Intel® AVX-512—an integrated feature in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors—provides built-in acceleration for AI, analytics, scientific simulations, financial simulations, and other compute-intensive tasks that involve vector-based computations.
Intel® AVX-512 is an essential element of the Intel® HPC Engines and Intel® AI Engines available in every Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor. These powerful features help you get more from the CPU, so you can power innovative use cases with optimal efficiency and ROI. Built-in accelerators are often less complex to use than discrete accelerators, helping solution designers achieve faster time to value.
As you consider your options for supporting advanced workloads such as AI, analytics, financial simulations, and scientific simulations, start by evaluating our built-in accelerator options. If your workload can be effectively executed on Intel® Xeon® processors by taking advantage of these accelerators, no additional acceleration hardware is needed—which helps reduce deployment and operational costs while simplifying integration.
How Intel® AVX-512 Works
The Intel® AVX-512 accelerator is a set of instructions that can boost performance for vector processing‒intensive workloads. Vector processing, an essential part of many advanced computational tasks, performs an arithmetic operation on a large array of integers or floating-point numbers in parallel.
With wide 512-bit vector-operations capabilities, Intel® AVX-512 can handle your most-demanding computational tasks without introducing specialized hardware. The accelerator’s large register supports 32 double-precision and 64 single-precision floating-point numbers, in addition to eight 64-bit and 16 32-bit integers.
Intel® AVX-512 also provides up to two 512-bit fused-multiply add (FMA) units. Doubling the width of the vector processing doubles the number of registers compared to its predecessor, Intel® AVX2.
Benefits of Intel® AVX-512 for Better Business Outcomes
Intel® AVX-512 helps you optimize ROI and achieve the advanced workload performance you need without introducing the complexity and cost of discrete accelerators. If your organization is looking to build applications and embrace next-generation capabilities like AI or HPC, Intel® AVX-512 can be a critical tool for deploying and operating these applications at scale. Likewise, if you’re building software solutions to sell to customers, Intel® AVX-512 support helps them deploy your offering with an optimal balance of performance and cost efficiency. For example, customers can experience up to 3x higher NAMD performance on 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable platform vs. 3rd Gen Intel Xeon platform.1
Use Cases
Intel® AVX-512 can accelerate data center performance for workloads, including scientific simulations, financial analytics, artificial intelligence (AI)/deep learning, 3D modeling and analysis, image and audio/video processing, cryptography, and data compression.
Many Intel customers are taking advantage of Intel® AVX-512 to enable better outcomes for their organizations. Visit our customer spotlight library to find real-world examples of how Intel® AVX-512 enables enhanced performance, ROI, and scalability.
Getting Started with Intel® AVX-512
Taking advantage of Intel® AVX-512 starts at the software level. If your organization creates software for either internal use or to sell to customers, we offer a wide range of supporting resources to help you implement support for Intel® AVX-512.
One of the best places to start is with our detailed workload-tuning guides, which give you step-by-step instructions for boosting performance with Intel® AVX-512 across specific types of workloads. These guides include:
- Improving deep learning AI performance
- Building and running the NAMD molecular dynamics application
- Tuning LAMMPS
- Optimizing ClickHouse analytics database management system performance
- Tuning Open vSwitch (OvS) with DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit)
You can access all of our tuning guides for Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors in our developer software tools catalog. For more details about Intel® AVX-512 and other Intel® instruction set extensions, consult the Intel® Architecture Instruction Set Extensions Programming Reference.
We also offer our Intel® oneAPI toolkits and components, which can help you streamline your development efforts, including the Intel® oneAPI HPC Toolkit, Intel® oneAPI Math Kernel Library, and Intel® oneAPI AI Analytics toolkit.
Finally, you can find the full repository of technical resources for Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions in the Intel® Developer Zone technical library.
Experiment with Intel® AVX-512 Today
In addition to consulting our reference materials, you can experiment with Intel® hardware, Intel® AVX-512, and other integrated acceleration features using Intel® Developer Cloud.
This free online platform for learning, prototyping, testing, and running workloads also includes support for a number of Intel® software development toolkits, tools, and libraries.
Visit Intel® Developer Cloud to sign up and get hands-on experience with our full platform for advanced workloads.
Power Advanced Workloads More Efficiently with Intel® AVX-512
As you seek to enable advanced capabilities in your software solution, Intel® AVX-512 helps make it possible without introducing the cost and complexity of specialized accelerators.
By supporting this powerful integrated feature in Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, you allow your organization—or your customers—to embrace next-generation technologies across analytics, AI, networking, and HPC in a more cost efficient and ROI-optimized way.