Yet, Intel still produces new CPU's without AVX/AVX2. 10th-gen.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199285/...
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199290/...
AVX2 is supported with i3s:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/199283/...
But since you can't rely on it, nobody wants to maintain a slow path fallback. One that's going to be used on all the slowest machines anyway, so it had better be good too.
AVX code is much harder to port on ARM, as the registers are 256 bits. By disabling AVX in low-end CPUs, Intel is forcing many people to still maintain SSE 4.1 versions. This is making much easier to port software from Intel to ARM.
I think that’s an example of quarterly report-driven management, Intel picked short-term profits at the cost of long-term strategy.
They used to do everything - legal or otherwise - to stay on top. Now they're not even bothering with the legal stuff.
AMD would have played ball, because it would have benefited them just as much.
Post Sandy Bridge the x86 license was probably proportionally more valuable to them than to Intel. If it went away, Intel still had their fabs, which at that time showed no sign of danger.
Probably these Pentiums and Celerons are used by the unfortunate 6.5% of Steam users without AVX1. If I would be working on a casual videogame instead of a resource-intensive CAM/CAE app, I probably wouldn’t want to require AVX.