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I was wondering generally, is SIMD a good idea for general purpose CPUs. Imagine if the current high end CPUs had double the number of cores, no SIMD, but possi

I was wondering generally, is SIMD a good idea for general purpose CPUs. Imagine if the current high end CPUs had double the number of cores, no SIMD, but possibly higher frequency and the algorithms that benefit from SIMD were all run on integrated accelerators instead. At least as a side observer it looks like a huge number of very large registers take large portions of a core, for sure consuming a lot of power as well, just to sit idle while the core is running JavaScript. Can somebody with CPU architecture experience say what is the real tradeoff here.

zamadatix 7y ago
Adding SIMD takes less space than adding cores and the use case where you need double the cores on a many core chip but aren't doing the same thing many times is pretty rare. SIMD units don't need to consume power or limit the frequency of the rest of the chip while not being used Same as when JavaScript is running on one boosted core and the other 63 powersave. While being used SIMD units are more efficient than running 2x or 4x entire cores just to get the additional operation per clock.