Intel announced a couple years ago that it was working on a new set of vector extensions as a superset of SSE, Advanced Vector Extensions or AVX. Now Paul Taylor is reporting that it will get its official debut at IDF in San Francisco this fall
The new set increases the size of SIMD vector registers from 128-bit to 256-bit, adds 12 new instructions as well as allowing instructions to have three operands instead of just two. This actually means that code execution efficiency should go up a bit, as well as providing some nifty floating-point juggling that will accelerate multimedia operations considerably, according to Intel. AVX is also said to cater to CPU parallelism and power efficiency – two driving forces of today’s CPU development. Increasing the scalability of parallel computing apps – something that will definitely appeal to the HPC crowd.
