There is probably a lot of merit in the advantages of vectors but it weakens the article to set them up as against SIMD when the presented facts are dubious at

There is probably a lot of merit in the advantages of vectors but it weakens the article to set them up as against SIMD when the presented facts are dubious at best: > An architect partitions the existing 64-bit registers > The IA-32 instruction set has grown from 80 to around 1400 instructions since 1978, largely fueled by SIMD. Wait, what. IA-32 started in 1985 not 1978. It didn't have any existing 64 bit registers. It was called IA-32 because of the 32 bit registers, like EAX and EBX. And then looking at the 1986 reference manual https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/i386.pdf https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2014/readings/i386.pdf I count 96 instructions under 17.2.2.11. The IA-32 instruction set didn't grow much all these years, IA-64 did to the best my knowledge but please let me know if I am wrong here. As for IA-64, I looked at https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/manuals/64-ia-32-architectures-software-developer-instruction-set-reference-manual-325383.pdf https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... and it's hard to get an accurate count because some instructions are grouped together, it's either 627 or 996 (and I may have made a counting mistake given I started from a PDF, but it should be close) which is indeed very high but even our best attempt only finds a tenfold growth (and perhaps only a 6.5) instead of the 17.5 the article suggested.