>So? AVX-512 shouldn't exist because it can't be retroactively enabled on older hardware? or because Intel can't say goodbye to Skylake? I don't understand the logic.
No one's saying it shouldn't exist, but it's a different story to ship software that requires it unconditionally, particularly if you are targeting the consumer market instead of only servers.
Not sure why you keep referring to Skylake since Intel hasn't shipped a Skylake-based CPU in years, and the most problematic CPUs currently shipping that lack AVX-512 support are several architectural generations ahead of Skylake, for both the P-cores and E-cores.
> Good thing Intel hasn't shipped a viable consumer-level CPU in years either. What should never have happened is Intel removing AVX-512.
Agreed on not removing, but saying that Intel hasn't shipped a viable consumer-level CPU in years is silly. They still ship huge volumes of CPUs, especially in laptops where AMD is still underrepresented.
> At one point, Intel integrated graphics were literally the most common individual GPU in the Steam Hardware Survey - Intel HD 4000 held the #1 spot until the GTX 970 overtook it in late 2015. Does that mean developers shouldn't have targeted discrete GPUs either, just because most survey participants didn't have the hardware they wanted to target?
Targeting a discrete GPU is different than not supporting integrated GPUs at all, which would be analogous. And many games do have to support integrated graphics even if the performance is not great, precisely because they don't aim high enough in the market to be able to ignore iGPUs entirely.
I also mention the Steam Hardware Survey because it tends to overrepresent users with higher end rigs. If you look at the non-gaming market, the hardware level tends to be considerably worse, and as a result a lot of productivity programs still ship plain SSE2 as their baseline required target.