Graphics Engineer, Joey aka Wunkolo, from Riot Games has said that AMD's Zen 4 CPUs with AVX-512 can bring major benefits to emulators such as Yuzu. The graphics engineer states that he has been adding AVX-512 acceleration in a range of emulators for some years now and his work can really benefit from upcoming CPUs from AMD.
Some of The Most Popular Emulators Such as Yuzu Now Have AVX-512 Support & AMD's Zen 4 CPUs Can Benefit Hugely From That
According to Joey, some of the emulators to which he has added AVX-512 acceleration include Yuzu (Nintendo Switch Emulator), Citra (Nintendo 3DS Emulator), Vita3K (PlayStation Vita Emulator), and Xenia (Microsoft Xbox 360 Emulator). The engineer states that he has been adding AVX-512 support into these emulators before it was considered "Cool". This was probably before AMD's & Intel's new CPU lineups which added AVX-512 acceleration to the consumer chips.
I've been adding AVX512 accelerations to emulators like Xenia, Vita3K, Citra, and Yuzu for some years now. Very recently contributing to Ryujinx.
Been doing this even when AVX512 wasn't "cool" yet. Now that Zen 4 has it they'll see the benefits immediately upon launch 💨— wunk (@Wunkolo) September 4, 2022
As we know, Intel's Alder Lake CPUs also added AVX-512 acceleration at launch and we have seen emulators such as RPCS3 (PlayStation 3 Emulator) showing a performance boost of up to 30% over standard AVX2 CPUs. But since then, Intel has more or less removed AVX-512 support entirely from its consumer lineup and is only available on the Xeon chips. This wasn't met with a positive response from the community but AMD, on the other hand, is definitely bringing AVX-512 support to consumers on its Ryzen 7000 & AM5 platform.
AMD itself has stated that its Zen 4 CPUs will offer a 30% improvement in FP32 inferencing and 2.5x uplift in INT8 inferencing performance with AVX-512 (VNNI) support.
Coming back to the topic, Joey also mentioned that all of this was done without using any 256-bit ymm registers or 512-bit zmm registers. The Register-width is easily the most boring part of these new ISA extensions and adds so much more to the ISA than stuff that can easily be done on the GPU instead, as he mentions. Joey doesn't have a blog post dedicated to his AVX-512 contributions within this emulator but he has documentation which he provided in his tweet:
I don't have a cool AVX512-focused blogpost just yet. I did document some other GFNI-based contributions though:https://t.co/00HqxB7skahttps://t.co/YWoxewO91x
Another way is to check out the AVX512-based PRs I author.https://t.co/40o5MNK3M3— wunk (@Wunkolo) September 4, 2022
For users who are invested in Emulation or want to try out console/handheld games on their PCs through emulators, it looks like AMD's Zen 4 CPUs with AVX-512 are going to be a good choice as they can offer a huge boost in performance. It remains to be seen how Intel responds to AMD's AVX-512 enablement on the consumer platform and whether they will bring it back in future CPU lineups or not.
