Intel has recently confirmed that its upcoming Haswell CPU architecture will support the AVX2 instruction set which is designed to improve processor performance in integer-heavy computational applications.
The announcement was made public on the company's Software Network forum by Mark Buxton, senior software engineer at Intel.Together with this news, Intel has also posted a document online, called Advanced Vector Extensions Programming Reference, which explains the new instruction set.“AVX2 extends Intel AVX by promoting most of the 128-bit SIMD integer instructions with 256-bit numeric processing capabilities. AVX2 instructions follow the same programming model as AVX instructions.”“In addition, AVX2 provide enhanced functionalities for broadcast/permute operations on data elements, vector shift instructions with variable-shift count per data element, and instructions to fetch non-contiguous data elements from memory,” reads the document.Outside of AVX2, Haswell will also include a hardware RNG (random number generator), which can be used to generate cryptographic keys for data encryption.Haswell is the code name used by Intel for Ivy Bridge's successor and this is expected to be launched in 2013.Not so many details are known at this time about the chip, but we do know that Haswell will be built using the 22nm Tri-Gate fabrication technology.Recent reports have also unveiled that Intel is expecting Haswell to deliver impressive graphics performance over the current-generation processors, while the CPU will also feature a configurable TDP technology.This will be introduced for the first time in the 2012 Ivy Bridge chips and enabled machines that use such processors to surpass their maximum TDPs for short amounts of time in order to speed up applications that require more computing power.The AVX instruction set was introduced for the first time in Intel's current Sandy Bridge architecture, which made its debut at the beginning of this year.
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