zen4 supports basically everything except the xeon phi SMT4 intrinsics (4VMMW or whatever). As did alder lake before its removal.

The support story for AVX extensions is not as complex as people make it out to be anyway. Server is a monotonic sequence, consumer is a monotonic sequence, both of them are converging apart from 1 or 2 that are unique to one or the other. Xeon Phi has the SMT4 intrinsics that are completely its own thing due to the SMT4 there, but you'll know if you're targeting xeon phi.

https://i.imgur.com/idAjB1X.png

So as you can see, consumer supports everything except BFloat16 for neural net training. Consumer doesn't do that so it's not a problem. And it doesn't support the Xeon Phi stuff because Xeon Phi is its own crazy thing.

No uarch family in that chart has ever abandoned an extension once it was adopted. So unless you are taking a consumer application and running it in the server, it's literally not even a problem. And server gets bfloat. That's it, that's literally the only two things you have to know.

but letting AMD fanboys draw le funni venn diagram is obviously way catchier than a properly organized chart representing the actual family trees involved... SSE would look bizarre if you represented it that way too, like all AMD's weird one-off SSE4 extension sets released in the middle of more fully-featured implementations... but people working in good faith would never actually be confused by that because they understand it's a different product family and year of release is not the only factor here.

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Really the thing that has been a problem is that server has been stalled out forever... first 10nm problems and now sapphire rapid has more than a dozen known steppings. They can't get the newer architectures out, so consumer has been moving ahead without them... up until alder lake nuked the whole thing. If server had been able to get newer uarchs out, there would be a lot more green bars in server too.

supposedly the fab teams are actually ready to go now, and the problem is the design teams aren't used to operating in an environment where they can't go down the hall and have the fab teams fix their shit. Intel put the foot down and aren't letting them do that anymore, since the fab teams need to sell the resulting process/cell libraries to external foundry customers, and the design teams need to be able to make their shit work on external foundries. You can't do this hyper-tuned shit where the process is tweaked to make your bullshit cell designs work. But some of the teams are not mature enough to work in a portable environment where design rules actually have to be obeyed because Intel historically never had to.

When you hear the infinite steppings of Sapphire Rapids and the network chip team's continued inability to put out a 2.5gbe chipset that works (I think we are on public release number 6 now?), it's pretty obvious who the worst culprits were. Meteor Lake may also be having packaging/integration problems (although this is supposition by me based on what products are delayed - coincidentally it is a lot of chiplet/tile stuff and intel obviously lacks experience in advanced packaging) but the products that have infinite steppings obviously can't get their own shit together even on their own tiles let alone talking to other people's tiles.

But Intel supposedly are not kidding that Intel 4 is ready to go and they've just got nothing to run on it yet. Hence looking for outside partners. Supposedly they've got at least one definite order signed for Intel 3 in 2024, and I think there will be a lot of people happy to diversify and derisk away from the TSMC monoculture that has emerged... if TSMC stumbles, right now there is no alternative.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ifs-lands-3nm-to-mak...

Samsung has all the same conflict-of-interest problems as Intel and also a track record of really mediocre fab execution. Supposedly they are ahead on GAAFET but like... we'll see, it's Samsung, who knows. They've stumbled just as much as Intel, just not on 7nm tier - I remember the iphone "is it TSMC or Samsung" games too. Samsung has put out a lot of garbage nodes and a lot of poorly-yielding nodes of their own.