
Intel expands chip instruction sets
Chip giant promises faster and more power-efficient computing

Intel is preparing to introduce a collection of 50 new chip instructions designed to make the handling of specific tasks more efficient, the company has revealed at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.
"We are working with customers to understand the next evolution in the instruction set," said Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president at Intel's Digital Enterprise Group.
"What are their emerging workloads and how can we enhance the instruction of the platform to embrace those new usage models and deliver a solution that handles the data sets?"
The new instructions will target applications such as high performance computing, media processing and pattern recognition, Gelsinger said.
They form two groups: the Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 are designed to deliver increased performance and greater energy efficiency for most applications; and a set of Application Targeted Accelerators will provide low-latency, low-power fixed-function capabilities for targeted applications.
"All of these are new emerging workloads that the platform and the instruction set needs to comprehend," said Gelsinger.
The instruction set is a collection of commands that a processor understands and is able to execute.
Examples are the Intel Architecture 32, the Intel 64 which is used in 64-bit Xeon and Pentium processors and the Itanium processor's IA-64.
AMD has its own instruction sets such as the 64-bit x86-64, which is fully compatible with Intel 64.
V3 Latest
First plant to grow on the Moon, err, dies
Cotton seedling freezes to death as Chang'e-4 shuts down for the Moon's 14-day lunar night
Fortnite news and updates: Fortnite made $2.4bn in 2018, according to SuperData
Fortnite easily out-earns PUBG, Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 in 2018
Japanese firm sends micro-satellites into space to deliver artificial meteor showers on demand
Meteor showers as a service will be visible for about 100 kilometres in all directions
Saturn's rings only formed in the past 100 million years, suggests analysis of Cassini space probe data
New findings contradict conventional belief that Saturn's rings were formed along with the planet about 4.5 billion years ago