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mdb31 | 3 years ago

> vector instructions are fundamentally necessary

For which percentage of users?

> AMD is actually adding AVX-512

Which is irrelevant to in-market support for that instruction set.

discuss

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retrac|3 years ago

> For which percentage of users?

Anyone using software that benefits from vector instructions. That includes a variety of compression, search, and image processing algorithms. Your JPEG decompression library might be using SSE2 or Neon. All high-end processors have included some form of vector instruction for like 20+ years now. Even the processor in my old eBook reader has the ARM Neon instructions.

mhh__|3 years ago

Any users who either wants performance or uses a language that can depend on a fast library.

XorNot|3 years ago

Why would it be irrelevant? Even the paucity of availability isn't really a problem - the big winners here are server users in data centers, not desktops or laptops. How much string parsing and munging is happening ingesting big datasets right now? If running a specially optimized function set on part of your fleet reduces utilization, that's direct cost savings you realize. If the AMD is then widening that support base, you're deeply favoring expanding usage while you scale up.

_rtld_global_ro|3 years ago

Given Intel's AVX extension could cause silent failures on servers (very high work load for prolonged time, compare to end user computers), I'm not sure it would be a big win for servers either: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2102.11245.pdf.