<i>"I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota.<p>Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks."</i><p>That was back in the stone age when a lot of applications for FP math weren't mainstream. Most of AVX-512 doesn't even concern FP, there's lots of integer and bit twiddling stuff there.<p>Furthermore, people really <i>do</i> care about these benchmarks. It influences their purchasing, which is really the thing that matters most to Intel. A lot of people don't actually care about hypothetical security issues or the fact that the CPU is 14nm when it still outperforms 7nm in single-threaded code.<p>Also, it's not like you can just trade off IPC or extra cores for wider SIMD. It's not like "just add more cores" is just as good for throughput, otherwise GPUs wouldn't exist. Wider SIMD is cheap in terms of die area, for the throughput it gives you.<p>Lastly, these are just <i>instructions</i>, nothing says that an AVX-512 instruction needs to go through a physical 512-bit wide unit, it just says that you can take advantage of those semantics, if possible.