With us today is Leendert vanDoorn, a Senior Fellow for AMD.
DDJ: Leendert, can you give us an overview of the x86 instruction set extensions that AMD is announcing?
LV: As the industry's focus is shifting from processor speeds to increasing power efficiency, the number of instructions executed per second on one processor core remains relatively constant. As a result, both software and hardware vendors must pursue new approaches to improving computing performance.
The introduction of the SSE5 additions to the x86 instruction set addresses the "real-world" challenges software developers face creating code for compute-intense applications. SSE5 enables software developers to simplify optimization efforts and achieve greater application performance, by getting more work out of each instruction.
To help the developer community take advantage of SSE5, AMD is making technical details available to the community nearly two years before shipping our Bulldozer product.
DDJ: What types of applications will benefit from SSE5 extensions?
LV: We see three markets where SSE5 will deliver the most immediate impact: High Performance Computing (HPC), multimedia applications, and security.
HPC workloads are increasing and showing up in non-traditional HPC domains. Examples of this are seismic data processing, financial analysis such as stock trend forecasting, and protein-folding algorithms that are used for medicine development. These algorithms require fast floating-point matrix and vector processing capabilities which SSE5 delivers. A floating-point matrix multiply using the new SSE5 extensions is 30 percent faster than a similar algorithm implemented with the existing SSE instructions.
Multimedia is an increasingly important part of the computing experience. Media processing and encryption (DRM) have become a major part of PC workload; new algorithms and formats have been developed, including MPEG-4 and H.264. SSE5 enables enhanced geometry transforms and physics modeling for scientific simulation and gaming, supports HD Video encoding and decoding and enables image enhancement and MP3 recording and manipulation. For example, Discrete Cosine Transformations (DCT), which are a basic building block for encoders, get a 20 percent performance improvement by using the new SSE5 extensions.
Security remains a top concern for the entire industry. SSE5 enables encryption algorithms to run more quickly increasing the usability of security features in the platform. For example, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm gets a factor of 5 performance improvement by using the new SSE5 extension compared to an AES implementation that just uses the AMD64 instructions.
DDJ: How do these extensions benefit software developers?
LV: Developers creating computing intensive applications are hitting a performance ceiling that forces them to balance functionality with performance. SSE5 will help developers to get more performance out of their core.
To create SSE5, AMD worked with software partners to identify the most effective and most used instructions in niche high-performance architectures, such as RISC. We then began implementing those for x86.
An example is the inclusion of 3-Operand Instructions in SSE5. 3-Operand Instructions enable developers to trade multiple simple 2-Operand Instructions for more complex, more productive instructions, reducing the number of instructions required to do the same work. By being smarter about the AMD64 extensions we are significantly boosting single core performance. Adoption of SSE5 will enable developers and software vendors creating high-performance computing, multimedia and security applications to condense instructions and achieve greater performance.
The other important thing for the software community is the steps AMD is taking to ease adoption. We're releasing the technical specification, available at developer.amd.com/SSE5 nearly two years before the instructions will be included in our silicon, to allow developers to weave the new instructions into natural release cycles. We're also working closely with the tool community to enable developer adoption -- PGI is on board, updates to the GCC compiler will be available this week, and AMD Code Analyst Performance Analyzer, AMD Performance Library, AMD Core Math Library and AMD SimNow (system emulator) are all updated with SSE5 support.
DDJ: Is there a web site readers can go to for more information?
LV: Yes, developer.amd.com/SSE5 is a good place to start.
