AMD has made a significant move by incorporating Znver6 support into the open-source GCC compiler prior to the release of Zen 6. This marks a change from the previous practice of releasing compiler patches alongside the product, which often resulted in Ryzen and EPYC processors launching without optimizations due to the delay in GCC and LLVM updates. The Linux distribution rarely updates compilers outside of the release cycle. This issue has now been addressed in advance.
The introduction of Zen 6 brings an expanded set of AVX-512 instructions, including AVX512_FP16, VNNI_INT8, and IFMA. A key aspect of this is the availability of 16-bit AVX-512 on mainstream desktop CPUs for the first time, making them a more versatile platform for AI and high-performance computing without the need for a separate accelerator. This development has the potential to significantly impact the computing landscape, particularly in the realm of AI and high-performance computing.