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This is so insane to me. I just don't understand it at all. Pervasive high performance SIMD would have provided a huge moat to porting compute heavy software aw

This is so insane to me. I just don't understand it at all. Pervasive high performance SIMD would have provided a huge moat to porting compute heavy software away from x86. But since you can't rely on it, nobody wants to maintain a slow path fallback. One that's going to be used on all the slowest machines anyway, so it had better be good too.

Const-me 6y ago
By the way, Intel’s SSE (the compatible vector stuff supported by 100% of modern CPUs) and ARM Neon both operate on 128-bit vectors, it’s usually not too hard to port between the two, did it more than once. AVX code is much harder to port on ARM, as the registers are 256 bits. By disabling AVX in low-end CPUs, Intel is forcing many people to still maintain SSE 4.1 versions. This is making much easier to port software from Intel to ARM. I think that’s an example of quarterly report-driven management, Intel picked short-term profits at the cost of long-term strategy.
- gnufx 6y ago
  For code using intrinsics (not assembler) https://simd-everywhere.github.io/blog/ https://simd-everywhere.github.io/blog/ might be helpful, including on x86_64, though it doesn't provide runtime dispatch. GCC itself knows a level (sse4.2?) of x86_64 intrinsics on ppc64le.
- reitzensteinm 6y ago
  Yes. Only the paranoid survive era Intel is rolling in its grave. They used to do everything - legal or otherwise - to stay on top. Now they're not even bothering with the legal stuff. AMD would have played ball, because it would have benefited them just as much. Post Sandy Bridge the x86 license was probably proportionally more valuable to them than to Intel. If it went away, Intel still had their fabs, which at that time showed no sign of danger.