AMD Previews New Processor Extensions

Posted by kdawson on Wednesday August 15, 2007 @08:37AM 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.

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Nothing special for Java or .NET by dnoyeb · 2007-08-15 10:27 · Score: 0, Troll

That must have been speculation or a SWAG from the poster to suggest it could be used to accelerate Java and/or .NET. There is nothing special about java or net that would allow this optimization. Both run on top of the OS and not on top of the hardware. So if the OS provided similar information about its routines, then that could be used. As it stands, the only thing to accelerate Java or .NET (both of which are c/c++ programs) is something that would accelerate any c/c++ program running on top of an OS.