Well I think it is significant. I'd say that overall the laptop/desktop space makes reasonable use of AVX and AVX2, probably more than your average load in the data center.
HPC certainly makes the most use of AVX/AVX2, but on the laptop/desktop you have at least:
- Gaming
- Media encoding and in some cases decoding (this also happens on GPU)
- Rendering and graphics work (this also happens on GPU)
- All sorts of random AVX2 use in compiler generated code and runtime libraries (e.g., AVX2 is used widely in perf sensitive libc routines like memcpy) and even in JIT-generated code
> AVX2 is used widely in perf sensitive libc routines like memcpy
Depends on the libc. I believe FreeBSD's libc avoids AVX to avoid the additional context switching cost for libc-using programs that don't already use AVX.
I'm not sure it makes too much sense to compare against older Cloud platforms — the same reason older Intel µarchs dominate (deployment of newer hardware takes time and money) also limits the availability of new AMD µarchs. But it is a reasonable point, if the relative prices of the offerings don't reflect the cost of new deployment in the way I imagine they would.
> I don't see how you could read my post and come to another conclusion?
I guess I misread your post! I'm sorry. My initial impression was that it was highly defensive of AMD. But I think I read too much into it. I'm sorry about that.