Hardware Support

With support for AVX2, AVX-512, and VNNI instruction sets, the DeepSparse Engine is validated to work on x86 Intel (Haswell generation and later) and AMD CPUs running Linux. Mac and Windows require running Linux in a Docker or virtual machine.

Here is a table detailing specific support for some algorithms over different microarchitectures:

x86 Extension	Microarchitectures	Activation Sparsity	Kernel Sparsity	Sparse Quantization
AMD AVX2	Zen 2, Zen 3	not supported	optimized	not supported
Intel AVX2	Haswell, Broadwell, and newer	not supported	optimized	not supported
Intel AVX-512	Skylake Cannon Lake, and newer	optimized	optimized	emulated
Intel AVX-512 VNNI (DL Boost)	Cascade Lake. Ice Lake, Cooper Lake, Tiger Lake	optimized	optimized	optimized