I'd like to be able to recommend the right CPU to customers, but there just isn't any information out in public about this...
Even if I were to, say, test with some cloud VMs, even then there are confounding issues. The different VM size categories aren't just different in the CPU type only, there are other differences that'll make the benchmark difficult to interpret. Memory type, throttling, HT on/off, etc...
Why is it so difficult for Microsoft to simply say "AVX-512 supported" somewhere in their documentation?
This is like every TV vendor saying "HDMI" instead of "HDMI 2.1" or whatever. Just because the port looks the same doesn't mean that they're identical! Versions matter.
They used to publish reference designs with specific servers and components.
Or if SQL server is open source, just go to their github/gitlab/whatever repo, and enter the name of a commonly-used avx512 intrinsic on the search field ?
Also, SQL server is definitely not open source lmao.
Well, if we're optimizing a terrible idea anyway...
https://download.01.org/perfmon/index/skylake_server.html
The FP_ARITH_INST_RETIRED.512B_PACKED_SINGLE performance counter _seems_ to be the hardware performance counter tracking AVX512-32-bit instructions.
You wouldn't even need a debugger. Just a reset: turn on hardware performance counters in the BIOS and run a profiler that can read the hardware performance counters. I don't know if that's the performance counter for sure that we're looking for. There's a few other 512B counters there.