The only thing they've done is disable it in the hybrid Alder Lake cores, presumably because the E-cores couldn't support it (while the P-cores could), and they didn't want to deal with the headaches of ISA extensions being supported only on some cores in the system.
That is incorrect. You can buy Alder Lake CPUs that only have one type of core (the i3 series only has P-cores, for example), and those do not support AVX-512 either. They're not "hybrid" in any way.
Some of their motherboard partners initially allowed you to access AVX-512, but Intel has put a stop to this and the feature is disabled on all Alder Lake CPU SKUs, period.
Newer Alder Lake chips have AVX-512 fused off in silicon, if the firmware blob disabling it isn’t enough: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-nukes-alder-lake-avx...
> Intel is not dropping support for it on a lot of CPUs.
That seems like a pretty questionable statement. Intel might keep AVX-512 around for Xeon, but it seems extremely dead on the consumer market. If Intel decides to bring it back for the next generation, that would be strange and very poor planning.
There are 0 current generation consumer CPUs of neither Intel nor AMD that have it
> The only thing they've done is disable it in the hybrid Alder Lake cores
Which happen to be all the current generation Intel CPUs