That's being very generous to Intel. It's much more believable that the strategy of mixing performance and efficiency cores in mainstream consumer processors starting with Alder Lake was a relatively last-minute decision, too late to re-work the Atom core design to add AVX512, so they sacrificed it from the performance cores instead.
The Intel consumer processors due out later this year are expected to include the first major update to their efficiency cores since they introduced Alder Lake. Only after that ships without AVX512 will it be plausible to attribute product segmentation as a major cause rather than just engineering factors.
(Intel's AVX10 proposal indicates their long-term plan may be to never support 512-bit SIMD on the efficiency cores, but to eventually make it possible for full 512-bit SIMD to make a return to their consumer processors.)
No question - but these kind of games lead to poor adoption.
They made a big todo about how much better than AMD they are with things like AVX512.
Then they play these games for market purposes.
Then they have stupid clock speed pauses, so when you try it your stuff goes slower.
Meanwhile - AMD is putting it on all their chips and it works reasonably there.
So I've just found the whole Intel style here kind of annoying. I really remember them doing bogus comparisons to non AVX-512 AMD parts (and projecting when their chips would be out). Reality is you are writing software that depends on AVX512 - tell clients to buy AMD to run it. Does AVX512 even work on efficiency cores and things like that? It's a mess.
Or Intel's repeated failures to roll out a working <14nm processes forced them to cripple even the P-core AVX-512 implementation (one less ALU port compared to Xeon Gold), rip out whatever compatibility feature they wanted to put in the E-cores and Microsoft refused to implement workarounds in Windows (e.g. make AVX-512 opt-in and restrict threads that enabled it to P-cores, reschedule threads faulting on AVX-512 instructions from E-core to P-cores).
Fair point - that cycle took FOREVER. I remember when their marketing slides starting doing comparisons between their unreleased future products and current (and sometimes about to be replaced) competitor products.
