How much would the lack of AVX hurt performance apart from scientific computing? It's interesting to see Intel offering a chip with a clear focus on tablet computing, so the lack of AVX might not be so bad if the Tremont cores improve battery life significantly.

I can answer that: a lot. AVX can speed up things anywhere from modest 20% (if not very well implemented) to massive 15 or 30x when carefully used (usually things that very good fits for AVX/AVX2 instructions/use cases).

Anecdotically, I have a "netbook" that has a Goldmont+ Celeron N4000 that works very respectable for everyday business (web browsing, office suites, watching videos, etc) but crawls when trying to run scientific code. 100x slowdowns at worst, 10x slowdowns on the parts that take "nice and easy" (wrt a 7200u notebook that I usually carry around).

> I can answer that: a lot.

You mean not much. The question was apart from scientific computing how much does it hurt. Per your own comment it's only worth maybe 20%, and that everyday needs work fine.

It'll show up occasionally in some things that would be relevant to a device with this SoC, like noise cancellation, but very little else. And even then you can do noise cancellation even better on a GPU (RTX Voice says hi), and this does still have a GPU and a decent one at that (~500 gflops), so it's not even that simple.

Most modern audio creation and DSP software use AVX, some even require it.