[corsix]

The elephant in the room contrast: Apple has been shipping this for years, whereas Intel _might_ ship theirs in something later this year.

[blinkingled]

> Note that these instructions are neither documented nor supported by Apple.

What does that mean? Someone pointed out below Apple ships accelerate framework as a higher level supported mechanism to use these instructions?

Intel/AMD have been always good at documenting most of their stuff so perhaps we will see proper supported ones whenever Intel ships it.

[fredoralive]

I think they mean that using the raw instructions is unsupported and undocumented, officially you have to use the libraries as the interface to them.

[cyber_kinetist]

Though in reality nobody is stopping you from using those undocumented instructions. If Apple’s Accelerate framework can use it so do you. (Or is it against the EULA?…) There is a slim chance that the behavior of these instructions might change with a software (if Apple is doing any kind of microcode update), but I kinda doubt it.

[maven29]

They've had something similar off-core with GNA since 2019 10th gen Ice Lake for low-power always-on inference use-cases.

[smoldesu]

Hasn't Intel been shipping scalar instructions for more than a decade?

[colejohnson66]

You’re probably thinking of AVX, Advanced Vector Extensions. That’s a family of vector extensions that has been out for just over a decade (2011). This is about AMX, Advanced Matrix Extensions. AMX is, as the name implies, built around 2D INT8/BF16 matrices (not “1D” FP16/32/64 vectors). It’s not on silicon available to the public.

[xattt]

Also not to be be confused with VMX (AltiVec/Velocity Engine), which predates AVX by another decade or so.

To keep the record straight, we have: 1. AMX, 2. AVX, and 3. VMX.

[colejohnson66]

There’s also Intel VMX, the Virtual Machine Extensions ;) Sometimes it’s referred to as VT-x.

[timdorr]

Intel's AMX specifically hasn't yet shipped, but will be coming with their new Sapphire Rapids Xeon chips this year.

[mhh__]

*Next year (potentially).

Sapphire rapids might well end up only shipping in Aurora and then being replaced immediately by it's successor.