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by BeeOnRope 2748 days ago
> I dispute the idea that SKL and the laptop/desktop space is significant in a discussion of AVX

Well I think it is significant. I'd say that overall the laptop/desktop space makes reasonable use of AVX and AVX2, probably more than your average load in the data center.

HPC certainly makes the most use of AVX/AVX2, but on the laptop/desktop you have at least:

- Gaming

- Media encoding and in some cases decoding (this also happens on GPU)

- Rendering and graphics work (this also happens on GPU)

- All sorts of random AVX2 use in compiler generated code and runtime libraries (e.g., AVX2 is used widely in perf sensitive libc routines like memcpy) and even in JIT-generated code
1 comments
loeg 2747 days ago
Yes, good points. To nitpick (sorry):

> AVX2 is used widely in perf sensitive libc routines like memcpy

Depends on the libc. I believe FreeBSD's libc avoids AVX to avoid the additional context switching cost for libc-using programs that don't already use AVX.

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