Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Previews New Processor Extensions

Posted by kdawson on from the parallel-universes dept.

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.

1 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. And so it goes on... by ceeam · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I wonder - amongst 16-bit "real mode", 16-bit "protected mode", 32-bit mode, 64-bit mode - how many different instruction kinds / opcodes a modern x86 CPU supports?