Intel has unveiled the latest additions to its Intel x86-64 instruction set that should provide boosts in performance and power efficiency for its CPUs. The new Intel AVX10 and APX extensions will be implemented in future Intel processors, starting with the company’s upcoming 6th Gen Xeon chips, codenamed Granite Rapids.
The first of the new instructions, AVX10 is a reworking of the company’s AVX-512 instructions that allowed for very rapid processing of single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions. That’s those where multiple calculations of the same type can be performed at the same time on multiple data inputs.
AVX-512 is very fast but extremely power intensive and complex to implement, which is why Intel actually dropped support for these instructions on its recent hybrid desktop CPUs, such as the 12900K and 13900K, that use different power (P) and efficiency (E) cores. The E-cores didn’t have native support for the instructions and Intel deemed it too complex to try and manage which cores would deal with AVX-512 instructions and which wouldn’t.
AVX10 changes all that with a new unified system that allows AVX-512 instructions to be performed on both P and E-Cores. This will bring back the benefit of these instructions to desktop Intel CPUs as well as make for simpler programming of these general types of instructions.
The other new extension is Advanced Performance Extensions (APX), which doubles the number of general-purpose registers (GPRs) from 16 to 32. A Intel puts is, ‘this allows the compiler to keep more values in registers; as a result, APX-compiled code contains 10% fewer loads and more than 20% fewer stores than the same code compiled for an Intel 64 baseline. Register accesses are not only faster, but they also consume significantly less dynamic power than complex load and store operations.’
As with AVX10, the first chips to gain the new APX instructions will be the 6th Gen Xeon Granite Rapids processors, but we can expect future desktop CPUs to gain these features too.
While we have a while to wait for new CPUs that support these instructions to arrive, you can find our current pick of the best CPUs here. Meanwhile, if you have any questions on thoughts on these new instructions, let us know them via the Custom PC Facebook page, via Twitter, or join our Custom PC and Gaming Setup Facebook group and tap into the knowledge of our 400,000+ members.