AVX instructions

[Magic Carpet]

Again, what is it good for ? Haven't seen it widespread, LynX benchmarks aside.

AMD vs Intel, similar perf?

Google had mixed results. I hope people in the know here, would care to explain

 

[Idontcare]

I know of no useful software that uses it, but I'm sure there are some apps out there that do. (just none come to mind)

 

[TuxDave]

It's good for anything FP heavy, but that obvious answer is probably not what you're looking for.

 

[IntelUser2000]

There's a few, but it looks like it won't be too much use for most of non-Xeon/embedded buying consumers.

NA software's DSP: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...CGkiPa&sig=AHIEtbSYkRR-ov-U2-b_D7Lp6QCzNH2BNg

Curtiss-Wright Continuum Vector: http://www.embedded-control-europe....library-for-intel-processors-with-256-bit-avx

Cakewalk Sonar X1: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/utilizing-intel-avx-with-cakewalk-sonar-x1/

 

[jhu]

Seems like they're almost encroaching on the GPU space on the CPU. AMD's new Radeon architecture is massive SIMD instead of VLIW.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Cheers guys, I appreciate the effort.

AVX2 extends Intel AVX by promoting most of the 128-bit SIMD integer instructions with 256-bit numeric processing capabilities.

Now this could be a major deal-breaker for some tasks, hmm. This is not coming with Ivy, is it?

Seems like they're almost encroaching on the GPU space on the CPU. AMD's new Radeon architecture is massive SIMD instead of VLIW.

Last I read, they're mixing best of the "both" worlds. I do hope, their next gen vid will retain stellar efficiency @ bitcoin-like loads.

 

[TuxDave]

Cheers guys, I appreciate the effort.

Now this could be a major deal-breaker for some tasks, hmm. This is not coming with Ivy, is it?

Deal-maker or deal-breaker? AVX2 seems like a plus to me, can't see why people wouldn't want it. And as far as I know AVX2 is debuting on Haswell onwards.

 

[Anarchist420]

PCSX2 uses it but I don't think it makes any difference compared to SSE 4.1/4.2

 

[nismotigerwvu]

PCSX2 uses it but I don't think it makes any difference compared to SSE 4.1/4.2

I think that is more of a case of it really being optimized and the general quirkiness of emulation. Just look at how emulating a Sega Saturn can bring a pretty potent machine to it's knees. The last time I checked, SSF was only recently able to emulate at full speed (granted this was a few years ago, but considering PS1 and N64 emulation has been at a fully playable level for about a decade the point remains valid)

 

[Tuna-Fish]

The big deal that comes in AVX2 is gather. With it, good compilers can auto-parallelize a lot of loads that they previously couldn't.

 

[Gundark]

PCSX2 uses it but I don't think it makes any difference compared to SSE 4.1/4.2

Gabest (great coder) tried to implement AVX extensions in video plugin for PCSX2, but for that task he said that he was pretty dissapointed in that instruction set.

 

[Gundark]

And here is his quote:
"Just wanted to say that AVX 1.0 is hopeless. My every attempt to make shorter code (and hopefully faster, vtune 2011 isn't AVX-ready...) actually results in the same length. AVX1 is about floating point instructions, not very useful for graphics, only the new 3 operand VEX encoding makes it slightly better than SSE."

 

[fastamdman]

I know AVX is used by overclockers with LinX/Intel Burn Test to help with stability testing. Without AVX and the proper linx binaries your gflops are essentially cut in half which really doesn't stress the system out as hard.

Other then that, I really have no clue what its used for lol.

 

[Magic Carpet]

Except for the niche uses as a few people brought up above ^, it turned out... that AVX1 is completely useless for my purposes.

Interesting commercial tactics.