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Do today chips still have die space for old instruction set? (alien.top)

submitted 10 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] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

This is incorrect. Very few x86 instructions uses microcode as the microcode engine is quite slow. It's mainly used for things like cpuid and such.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Microcode is used very heavily in modern CPUs. It has been since the 90s.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

A lot of x86 ISA is in the micro and PAL codes. Only the most frequent and performance-limiting ones are on-core for modern x86.

x86 is a huge set, so "very few" is a relative term ;-)