3 ms·

Rosetta 2 doesn't support the SIMD extensions AVX (2011) and newer, but compatibility still seems pretty good

• andy_ppp 6y ago
  This 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    You 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.
    • andy_ppp 6y ago
      Yes sorry so am thinking of AVX-512 you are correct.
      • acdha 6y ago
        No problem - Intel’s marketing hasn’t helped at all. I notice this mostly for cryptography- we do a lot of data validation so spending up SHA is a nice win.
• rsynnott 6y ago
  Very little software would _depend_ on AVX being there; it'd be too great a limit on backwards compatibility.