Generally speaking the distribution-packaged versions of python and all its scientific libraries and their support libraries are best ignored. That stuff should always be rebuilt to suit your actual production hardware, instead of a 2007-era Opteron.
A few followups: (1) Is this usable for non-intelex packages? (2) What about packages not in conda's channels?
Intel(R) Extension for Scikit-learn* enabled (https://github.com/intel/scikit-learn-intelex)
(A jump that large suggests to me they may be fixing issues in the default implementation that could also be fixed for other processors!)
I completely agree. I hope some Intel competitor funds a scikit-learn developer to read this code and extract all the portable performance improvements.