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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS)
Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) is a performance monitoring technique that provides precise information about AMD64 instruction fetch behavior and about the execution of operations that are issued...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: SSE4a Instruction Set
Writing SIMD code poses several complications. Doing 2 to 16 operations with one instruction is a powerful feature, but unless you have enough support instructions to get your data back and forth...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: MONITOR/MWAIT
MONITOR and MWAIT are two separate instructions that are used together to monitor a range of linear memory. MONITOR tells the processor what address range to watch for a STORE instruction. MWAIT hints...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: Sideband Stack Optimizer
Sideband Stack Optimizer is one of many of the AMD “Barcelona” processor’s evolutionary “CPU Core IPC improvement” features. The Sideband Stack Optimizer is special circuitry in the core that tracks...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: 128-bit FPU
The new AMD “Barcelona” processors introduce dramatically improved numerical performance when using the standard SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instruction extensions. Previous AMD processors typically could...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: Advanced Bit Manipulation (ABM)
One of the new instruction sets introduced in the Third Generation AMD Opteron™ processor is Advanced Bit Manipulation (ABM), comprising two instructions that operate on general purpose registers:...
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¡Live from Barcelona!
While you are working hard on your next project, the Developer Outreach team is also working hard in Barcelona talking about all the great tools and techniques we have for optimizing your code for...
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We Left Our Hearts in Barcelona
AMD Developer Outreach had a big, shiny presence at the recent Microsoft® TechEd Developers 2007 event, which took place in Barcelona, Spain during the week of November 5th (see photo montage, below)....
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: SSE Misaligned Access
We all crave high performing code and in the process we try hard to optimize the algorithms, reorder instructions, unroll loops, avoid branches, reduce pointer usage to allow compilers to optimize,...
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“Barcelona” Processor Feature: CPUID
To use or not to use CPUID, that is the question. CPUID is an instruction that tells you what features of a processor are supported. This instruction definitely has a time and place to be used and not...
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