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While that's true, Intel has steadily extended x86 over the years and many programs depend on those extensions, which are still patent protected.
by scoopertrooper 6y ago
While that's true, Intel has steadily extended x86 over the years and many programs depend on those extensions, which are still patent protected.
- Dylan16807 6y agoHow many programs depend on SSE3 or later? Any earlier extensions are free now.
- rasz 6y agoGames, pretty much all of the AAA ones. ~10 years ago you would read cries of AMD x64 users not able to play SSE3 games. 2-5 years ago situation was repeating with AMD Phenom I/II owners and SSSE3/SSE4.
- Joe_Cool 6y agoUsing a compiler with proper switches is hard it seems. Some also blame 3rd party libraries or DRM.
- kalleboo 6y agoRosetta 2 doesn't support the SIMD extensions AVX (2011) and newer, but compatibility still seems pretty good
- andy_ppp 6y agoThis is because very little uses AVX instructions, hasn't it always been better to optimise software for the GPU rather than AVX instructions, even though they are not perfectly interchangeable.
- saagarjha 6y agoI think it's more that compatible Mac software has historically compiled for non-Haswell targets in some form or the other for compatibility.
- acdha 6y agoYou might be thinking of the most recent AVX-512 extensions which had significant power management complications delaying adoption. Many common programs have optimized SIMD paths because GPU computing is significantly more complicated and the setup overhead makes it slower for uses which don’t process tons of data - one of the interesting points about the M1 is that the unified memory design avoids the overhead of copying data between the CPU and GPU.
- rsynnott 6y agoVery little software would _depend_ on AVX being there; it'd be too great a limit on backwards compatibility.