Talk:Advanced Vector Extensions

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Completely rewritten

I have rewritten the whole page to fix the issues discussed below and because the article had the tag:

AES, PCLMUL and FMA are separate instruction sets which I have put into separate articles. I have added information about AMD support, operating system support and many technical details. Afog (talk) 11:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

extended precision?

I want to clarify that AVE does 4x64 bit (double precision) and 8x32 bit (single precision) but NOT 2x128 (extended precision). The docs seem to indicate this as there is nothing mentioned about 128 bit floating point numbers. Can an expert please verify this statement as it is critical to understanding AVE.

Gene Thomas (talk) 03:08, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

why does AVX look like altivec?

ibm calls AltiVec VMX, and actually never believed in altivec before apple and nintendo insisted on it for the Gecko and the later G5 design upgraded on the G5 to a 256bit SIMD and a 128Bit SIMD on the Gamecube and Wii. personally i think apple might have had something to do with AVX, but that's just speculation Markthemac (talk) 01:45, 9 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

FMA

The article states that 1) the published AVX instruction set includes FMA instructions, and 2) FMA will appear in a future extension of the instruction set. There's a contradiction here, please clarify. --85.140.239.250 (talk) 20:22, 5 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Power efficient, idle power usage is insignificant

This is supposedly due to the new instructions? I think a link to source material is needed here or atleast a re-write, as generally I understand the term idle to imply that the processor is doing nothing! As I understand it, power usage during idle NOP instructions is a function of the power control unit within the CPU and not due to an instruction which in an Intel cpu is a microcode op or series of microcode ops.

I would suggest that the meaning here is to imply that a future CPU implementing AVE will have enhanced power control over these new instructions, shutting off unused units during AVE instuction execution. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.13.171.234 (talk) 00:16, 10 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The phrase "idle power usage is insignificant" refers to the power usage caused by leakage current of the extra transistors added to implement the AVX logic in the processor. Transistors use power even when they are not switching. All modern x86 processors shutoff idle units by gating the clock signal into the unit. When the clock signal is turned off, power consumption of the unit will be due solely to transistor leakage current. The power consumed by the AVX unit when the AVX unit is idle is an insignificant portion of the total power consumed by the processor. Typically, this would mean below 1% of total power. Ksavage9 (talk) 20:50, 20 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

AMD reaction

Please incorporate in article info from http://forums.amd.com/devblog/blogpost.cfm?catid=208&threadid=112934 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.167.112.66 (talk) 14:11, 6 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Compiler support

Free Pascal is developing support for AVX within their SVN repository. I don't know if that's applicable or not to mention. PrincessSchala (talk) 08:09, 14 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]

three-operand instruction for sqrt?

Maybe someone can explain what sqrt with 3 operands means? xmm1=xmm2=sqrt(xmm3)?

 vsqrtsd xmm1, xmm2, xmm3

I'm disappointed - no fast exp(), cos() etc. Unlike CUDA. Intel really has a problem. Oh, and have to get a new operating system to use the thing. Oh, really. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 113.190.231.252 (talk) 11:51, 21 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Windows XP and AVX

Does Windows XP support the AVX instructions? If not, what is the minimum Microsoft OS needed to support AVX?