this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Do today chips still have die space for old instruction set? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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This is just a nitpicking question. Do Intel chips still have some space/transistors dedicated to SSE3? If they do, why can't they implement SSE3 by other, more powerful instrutions (like AVX) to save die space?

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

The x86 instructions go through a translation layer that turns them into CPU specific instructions (microcode). So the CPU doesn't need any specific hardware to be compatible with these old instructions, it just needs to know how to get the same result with microcode.