It looks more like optimized kernels for some operations, rather than extended functionality. Which is to say, using it shouldn't produce any lock-in for well structured projects -- it is like changing which BLAS library you've linked to.
Not sure what kind of secret sauce they've included, but it is Intel so their specific advantage is that they know everything about their processors and can provide really low level optimizations which might not necessarily be super portable.
I listened to an interesting CPPCast episode where they interviewed someone from Intel's compiler team.
(I'm just guessing that a lot of the benefit here comes from building with Intel's compiler rather than GCC.)
It sounded like the bulk of the benefits they get are just from using profile-guided optimization to maximize the cache-friendliness of the code. I would guess those kinds of optimizations are readily portable to any CPU with a similar layout and cache sizes. I would not expect, though, that they are actively detrimental (compared to whatever the official sklearn builds are doing) on CPUs that have a different cache layout.
Huh, wasn't aware of CPPCast, it seems neat. My podcast listening has mostly been politics, just because they seem to be in much greater supply. Now I just need to find a fortran cast. They could call it... FORTCAST.
Not sure what kind of secret sauce they've included, but it is Intel so their specific advantage is that they know everything about their processors and can provide really low level optimizations which might not necessarily be super portable.