AMD Previews New Processor Extensions

An anonymous reader writes "It has been all over the news today: AMD announced the first of its Extensions for Software Parallelism, a series of x86 extensions to make parallel programming easier. The first are the so-called 'lightweight profiling extensions.' They would give software access to information about cache misses and retired instructions so data structures can be optimized for better performance. The specification is here (PDF). These extensions have a much wider applicability than just parallel programming — they could be used to accelerate Java, .Net, and dynamic optimizers." AMD gave no timeframe for when these proposed extensions would show up in silicon.

Comments

Re:Will Intel Adopt These Instructions?

[The Real Nem]

EM64T?

Re:Just performance counters?

[imgod2u]

Looking at the PDF, it supposedly gathers profile data in the background (in local caches on the chip itself) and dumps periodically depending on the OS/application settings. This allows it to profile on-the-fly with very little impact on application performance.

The application can then gather the information, which is stored in its address space, and do with it what it will (optimize on-the-fly).

Of particular interest is that the OS can allow the profile information to be dumped to the address space of other threads/processes as well as the one that the data is collected on. The OS controls the switching of the cached profile information during a context switch.

This is both cool (in that a secondary core/thread can help optimize the first) and scary (one thread getting access to another's instruction address information). I predict there will be exactly 42 Windows patches released 3.734 days after the service pack that allows Windows to take advantage of this feature because of security reasons.

Re:I wish AMD and Intel teamed up for once

[x2A]

So what we need really is a "native" x86 compiler, say, from Intel, that would maybe outperform the multi-platform GCC compiler... an Intel C/C++ Compiler, or 'ICC' we could call it... maybe...

Oh who am I kidding, that could never happen.