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I was referring to software adoption. Software adoption cycle is similar, as wider software adoption happens only when there is enough market penetration of CPU

I was referring to software adoption. Software adoption cycle is similar, as wider software adoption happens only when there is enough market penetration of CPUs that support new instructions. There was AMD's 3DNow! that saw limited software adoption, because Intel didn't support it. Newer instruction sets are getting adopted progressively slower as consumers are replacing computer less often, AMD is slower at adopting each new AVX instruction set and Intel is getting more aggressive with market segmentation. Because market penetration of new instruction sets is getting slower, SW adoption is also much slower.

janwas 5y ago
Totally agree software uptake is the pain point. Not even all gamer CPUs have SSE4 (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey), so it seems that runtime dispatch is unavoidable. Given that, if we can afford to generate code for new instruction sets and bundle it all into one slightly larger binary/library, the problem is solved, right? Highway makes it much easier to do that - no need to rewrite code for each new instruction set. As to Intel's market segmentation, we target 'clusters' of features, e.g. Haswell-like (AVX2, BMI2); Skylake (AVX-512 F/BW/DQ/VL), and Icelake (VNNI, VBMI2, VAES etc) instead of all the possible combinations.