AVX / AVX2 / AVX-512 Performance + Power On Intel Rocket Lake

Up first was the Leela Chess Zero (lc0) neural network chess engine with its BLAS back-end. The increasing AVX levels did help enhance the performance ever so slightly...

While the AVX-512 performance was slightly faster, it did spike the i9-11900K power consumptuon significantly. No AVX or just using AVX/AVX2 led to a 154 Watt average during that benchmark while with the AVX-512 configuration was a 178 Watt average. The peak was also significantly higher at 220 Watts compared to 177~178 Watts with the lower AVX tiers.

The increased AVX-512 power usage translated into a CPU operating temperature of about ~3 degrees higher on average or a peak of 6 degrees higher. A Noctua NH-U9S heatsink with dual fans was used during all of the testing.

The dav1d performance did improve slightly with the higher AVX levels.

But again when hitting AVX-512 is the significantly higher power consumption -- 226 Watt peak versus 156 Watts -- during AV1 video decoding.