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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: asyikarea51 on December 16, 2014, 02:34:49 am

Title: A quick question on cpu extensions or whatever they're called
Post by: asyikarea51 on December 16, 2014, 02:34:49 am

So I was in a wiki-walk of sorts in Intel's website, and I noticed that all the top-end Xeon server processors (the fast ones with ridiculous core counts) only have AVX 2 in the supported list.

Ignoring emulation (that's the only thing I can think of really, seems minor), if coming from the perspective of "a clueless idiot :banghead: consumer" i.e. myself:

Am I losing out on overall app & game compatibility - be it today's programs or legacy - if, for some (completely hypothetical unexplainable) reason, I run a computer with this type of CPU that doesn't have the SSE x.x extensions that most programs kinda expect the CPU to have? Is AVX as a whole "somehow backwards compatible" just because it's "bigger" or is it purely stand alone because of how specific all those instruction set... things... are?

*where x is a number

Take this as a curiosity, I guess... :confused:

Title: Re: A quick question on cpu extensions or whatever they're called
Post by: The E on December 16, 2014, 02:42:48 am

AVX is a superset of SSE. In other words, you won't be able to buy a cpu that supports AVX but doesn't do SSE.

Title: Re: A quick question on cpu extensions or whatever they're called
Post by: asyikarea51 on December 16, 2014, 02:59:36 am

Oh it was a superset? So in general, if AVX 2.0 is in the CPU spec, it is assumed/understood it should be able to compute anything from all previous SSE (and the first AVX) instruction sets?  :confused:

Thanks in advance.

Title: Re: A quick question on cpu extensions or whatever they're called
Post by: The E on December 16, 2014, 03:09:09 am

Yes.

Title: Re: A quick question on cpu extensions or whatever they're called
Post by: asyikarea51 on December 16, 2014, 03:22:16 am

Ok that clears things up for me, just unwarranted paranoia left over at this point. Thanks.