CPU All those special CPU instruction sets

Digital Larry

Cable Smoosher
Original poster
Oct 15, 2019
10
0
I did a CPU comparison of my putt putt Athlon X4 740 against a Ryzen 5 1600. One thing that surprised me was that the Ryzen apparently lacks all those custom instruction sets like SSE and MMX etc. Then I read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions which suggests that most people never used those, although some small percentage of scientists perhaps do. I know that crypto currency mining has turned towards using the GPU rather than the CPU for heavy computation. I don't have a specific question about it, I just think it's interesting (and kinda sad) that Intel and AMD put a lot of effort into something that was supposed to provide some competitive advantage and (almost) nobody ever bothered to use it.
 

dnpp123

Trash Compacter
Jun 6, 2019
37
3
According to : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419845 Ryzen does have SSE and MMX.

Cpu flags 3700X :

Code:
flags  : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid extd_apicid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq monitor ssse3 fma cx16 sse4_1 sse4_2 movbe popcnt aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw ibs skinit wdt tce topoext perfctr_core perfctr_nb bpext perfctr_llc mwaitx cpb cat_l3 cdp_l3 hw_pstate sme ssbd mba sev ibpb stibp vmmcall fsgsbase bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 cqm rdt_a rdseed adx smap clflushopt clwb sha_ni xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves cqm_llc cqm_occup_llc cqm_mbm_total cqm_mbm_local clzero irperf xsaveerptr wbnoinvd arat npt lbrv svm_lock nrip_save tsc_scale vmcb_clean flushbyasid decodeassists pausefilter pfthreshold avic v_vmsave_vmload vgif umip rdpid overflow_recov succor smca

Unless you doing pretty tense and heavy optimized stuff, compilers are pretty good at guessing custom instructions (usually) so using them doesn't require much more efforts from a programming side of things (usually).
 

Digital Larry

Cable Smoosher
Original poster
Oct 15, 2019
10
0
Must be a bug in the CPU compare tool then. Surprised me to think that all of that just disappeared! thanks.