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Datasheet 27
Technologies
3.6 Intel
®
Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel
®
AVX)
Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (Intel AVX) is a new 256-bit vector SIMD extension of
Intel Architecture. The introduction of Intel AVX started with the 2nd Generation Intel
®
Core™ processor family. Intel AVX accelerates the trend of parallel computation in
general purpose applications like image, video and audio processing, engineering
applications (such as 3D modeling and analysis), scientific simulation, and financial
analysts.
Intel AVX is a comprehensive ISA extension of the Intel 64 Architecture. The main
elements of Intel AVX are:
• Support for wider vector data (up to 256-bit) for floating-point computation
• Efficient instruction encoding scheme that supports 3 operand syntax and
headroom for future extensions
• Flexibility in programming environment, ranging from branch handling to relaxed
memory alignment requirements
• New data manipulation and arithmetic compute primitives, including broadcast,
permute, fused-multiply-add, and so on
• Floating point bit depth conversion (Float 16)
• A group of 4 instructions that accelerate data conversion between 16-bit
floating point format to 32-bit and vice versa.
• This benefits image processing and graphical applications allowing
compression of data so less memory and bandwidth is required.
The key advantages of Intel AVX are:
• Performance – Intel AVX can accelerate application performance using data
parallelism and scalable hardware infrastructure across existing and new
application domains:
— 256-bit vector data sets can be processed up to twice the throughput of 128-bit
data sets
— Application performance can scale up with the number of hardware threads and
number of cores
— Application domain can scale out with advanced platform interconnect fabrics
• Power Efficiency – Intel AVX is extremely power efficient. Incremental power is
insignificant when the instructions are unused or scarcely used. Combined with the
high performance that it can deliver, applications that lend themselves heavily to
using Intel AVX can be much more energy efficient and realize a higher
performance-per-watt.
• Extensibility – Intel AVX has built-in extensibility for the future vector extensions:
— Operating System context management for vector-widths beyond 256 bits is
streamlined
— Efficient instruction encoding allows unlimited functional enhancements:
• Vector width support beyond 256 bits
• 256-bit Vector Integer processing
• Additional computational and/or data manipulation primitives