On: SIMD Instructions Considered Harmful (2017)

[CoolGuySteve]

A few years ago I tried to buy a liquid cooled overclocked server for trading. Enabling AVX cost extra due to the concentrated heat output from the MMU and each core's vector unit.

It was along the lines of being able to get a server that was tested stable at 5GHz without AVX vs 4.5 GHz with AVX for the same price.

So at least on Intel, these vector units are apparently limiting clock speeds and yields due to power consumption.

[kllrnohj → CoolGuySteve]

Yes, but not due to instruction decode costs, which is really all this article is talking about.

The real heat comes from actually doing the work, not decoding what work to do.