Items tagged with avx-512

Regular readers will recall that we wrote about Intel's X86S proposal awhile back. That was merely in the concept stages, but it's an idea to shed a lot of the legacy cruft from x86-compatible processors. It looks like Intel's engineers aren't done fiddling around in the instruction set, though, because the company's... Read more...
The PlayStation 3's Cell Broadband Engine was fairly unlike any other processor. It had capabilities that make emulating the system surprisingly demanding, even for modern hardware. As we've reported before, the AVX-512 SIMD extensions help with this quite a bit, but Intel cut off support for the instructions in its... Read more...
The AVX-512 instruction set has had a bizarre history. Originally introduced with Intel's Xeon Phi processors based on the "Knights Landing" design, it later found its way into the company's server processors starting with Skylake-SP in 2017. The first consumer processors to include AVX-512 were the laptop forms of... Read more...
Ever since the advent of the Multi-Media eXtensions, better known as "MMX," Intel has had a long history of tacking on instruction set extensions to add additional capabilities to its x86-family of CPUs. There have been many other instructions for other purposes, but arguably the most important additions to the ISA... Read more...
As contentious as the topic is among certain enthusiasts, for the most part, the presence or absence of 512-bit-wide vectors in Intel's desktop CPUs is a largely academic consideration. Very little software makes use of AVX-512. Certainly there's not much that Intel expects purchasers of its mainline desktop and... Read more...
The saga of AVX-512 on Alder Lake has been an interesting one. Originally, folks reasonably assumed that the 12th-Gen Core processors would support AVX-512 extensions. After all, it was supported on the last-generation Rocket Lake chips, to say nothing of Ice Lake before that. Then we found out about Alder Lake's... Read more...
Reading through technical documents is rarely fun, but every so often there are interesting nuggets to uncover. Such is the case with a document (PDF) on Intel's website in regards to its upcoming 10-nanometer Cannon Lake processors. According to the "Intel Architecture Instruction Set Extensions and Future Features... Read more...