Weird Float16 behavior on sapphirerapids (r7i family on EC2)

[rbvermaa]

On a downloaded binary 1.9.4 release for x86_64-linux of julia we are getting the following weird Float16 behavior:

$ julia-1.9.4/bin/julia

julia> Float16(2.0)
Float16(0.0)

julia> versioninfo()
Julia Version 1.9.4
Commit 8e5136fa297 (2023-11-14 08:46 UTC)
Build Info:
  Official https://julialang.org/ release
Platform Info:
  OS: Linux (x86_64-linux-gnu)
  CPU: 8 × Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8488C
  WORD_SIZE: 64
  LIBM: libopenlibm
  LLVM: libLLVM-14.0.6 (ORCJIT, sapphirerapids)
  Threads: 1 on 8 virtual cores

We are evaluating the r7i familiy of instances on EC2 and ran into the above.

On 1.10 rc1 it seems to work properly:

$ julia-1.10.0-rc1/bin/julia 
julia> Float16(2.0)
Float16(2.0)

[vchuravy]

Potential duplicate of #51686?

[BioTurboNick]

Yeah that's the same. Though I'm a little confused about what happened to my proposed PR to fix it... I guess it was ignored and then automatically closed when the target branch was deleted?

[vchuravy]

when the target branch was deleted?

Github does that sometimes.

[rbvermaa]

Oops, sorry for the duplicate issue!