According to Phoronix Elena Demikhovksy, Senior Software Engineer at Chipzilla said that Cannonlake CPUs have AVX-512 support. It is unlikely to appear on all Cannonlakes processor as Chipzilla will likely disable it on many mainstream processor models such as the Core i3 and Core i5 it will be a feature in the higher-end Core i7. The chips will also have SHA Extensions and UMIP.

So far the AVX-512 IFMA and VBMI support has been seen in server CPUs, but never desktop processors.

The move is important because the AVX-512 instruction set enables applications like Prime95 to take advantage of the extra wider registers and execution units. This means that they can go to the twice the peak Floating Point (FP) throughput.

This makes the AVX-512 will be beneficial in high-performance computing applications, but there are not applications out. But when these become available. AMD’s Zen is expected to have two FMAC 256-bit units that might join together to process 512-bit AVX floating point instructions. It is possible perceived competition from Zen might actually have motived Intel to make sure that it worked.