> Are you implying there are no use cases for matrix multiply?
The whole point is that these highly specialized scenarios are only featured in very specialized usecases, and don't reflect in overall performance.
We've been dealing with the regular release of specialized processor operations for a couple of decades. This story is not new. You see cherry-picked microbenchmarks used to plot impressive bar charts, immediately followed by the realization that a) in general this sort of operator is rarely invoked with enough frequency to be noticeable, b) you need to build code with specialized flags to get software to actually leverage this feature, c) even then it's only noticeable in very specialized workloads that already run on the background.
I still recall when fused multiply-add was such a game changer because everyone used polynomials and these operations would triple performance. Not the case.
And more to the point, do you believe that matrix multiplication is a breakthrough discovery that is only now surfacing? Computers were being designed around matrix operations way before they were even considered to be in a household.
The whole point is that these highly specialized scenarios are only featured in very specialized usecases, and don't reflect in overall performance.
We've been dealing with the regular release of specialized processor operations for a couple of decades. This story is not new. You see cherry-picked microbenchmarks used to plot impressive bar charts, immediately followed by the realization that a) in general this sort of operator is rarely invoked with enough frequency to be noticeable, b) you need to build code with specialized flags to get software to actually leverage this feature, c) even then it's only noticeable in very specialized workloads that already run on the background.
I still recall when fused multiply-add was such a game changer because everyone used polynomials and these operations would triple performance. Not the case.
And more to the point, do you believe that matrix multiplication is a breakthrough discovery that is only now surfacing? Computers were being designed around matrix operations way before they were even considered to be in a household.