AVX instructions

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
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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 :)
 
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Idontcare

Elite Member
Oct 10, 1999
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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

Lifer
Oct 8, 2002
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It's good for anything FP heavy, but that obvious answer is probably not what you're looking for. :)
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
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jhu

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
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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

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
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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.
 
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TuxDave

Lifer
Oct 8, 2002
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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.
 

nismotigerwvu

Golden Member
May 13, 2004
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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

Golden Member
Mar 4, 2011
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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

Member
May 1, 2011
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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.
 

fastamdman

Golden Member
Nov 18, 2011
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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

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
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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.