Intel Won't Support SSE5: Nobody Is Surprised
AMD made an announcement a few weeks ago that made many in the industry scratch their heads: AMD (not Intel) will release SSE5. This was quite confusing since AMD is known for their own set of instructions, 3D Now!, which the company has quietly dropped development of in favor or following Intel's lead with SSE instruction sets.
One of the major reasons SSE was able to supplant 3D Now! is that Intel has one of the best software support divisions of any hardware company on the planet. While both AMD and Intel were able to release detailed documents on how developers could utilize their instruction sets, Intel went a step further and added automatic SSE optimizations to the compilers and libraries they were already distributing.
The bottom line is that developers looking to squeeze every iota of performance out of their programs would probably do most of the coding by hand and 3D Now! had a chance to win those types of developers over. There are, however, many more developers didn't have the time and resources to dedicate to a no-holds barred optimization and thus were happy to let the compiler handle it, even if it wasn't quite as optimized as if they spent a lot more time and money re-writing the code themselves.
So will Intel support AMD's SSE5?
“Perhaps more interestingly, he said that AMD had forked by introducing SSE5. Intel has no intention whatever to support SSE5, he said.”
Will Intel eventually give in and end up supporting SSE5, will they make their own, or just jump to SSE6 or some other naming convention? Will AMD increase their software support and try to close the gap with Intel in this area? There are all good questions, but all we can do now is speculate. What are your thoughts?
One of the major reasons SSE was able to supplant 3D Now! is that Intel has one of the best software support divisions of any hardware company on the planet. While both AMD and Intel were able to release detailed documents on how developers could utilize their instruction sets, Intel went a step further and added automatic SSE optimizations to the compilers and libraries they were already distributing.
The bottom line is that developers looking to squeeze every iota of performance out of their programs would probably do most of the coding by hand and 3D Now! had a chance to win those types of developers over. There are, however, many more developers didn't have the time and resources to dedicate to a no-holds barred optimization and thus were happy to let the compiler handle it, even if it wasn't quite as optimized as if they spent a lot more time and money re-writing the code themselves.
So will Intel support AMD's SSE5?
“Perhaps more interestingly, he said that AMD had forked by introducing SSE5. Intel has no intention whatever to support SSE5, he said.”
Will Intel eventually give in and end up supporting SSE5, will they make their own, or just jump to SSE6 or some other naming convention? Will AMD increase their software support and try to close the gap with Intel in this area? There are all good questions, but all we can do now is speculate. What are your thoughts?
