Emulation is not necessarily an area in which we particularly expected new processors from AMD, and yet.
AMD’s Ryzen 7000 support for AVX-512 instructions paves the way for further optimizations, especially in the area of emulation, although Intel itself should completely disable them on the Raptor generation Lake.
What are AVX-512 instructions?
Dreamed up by Intel and launched in July 2013, the AVX-512 instruction set is a set of… instructions aimed at accelerating performance on very specific loads.
From his full name Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512this set focuses, according to its designer, on scientific simulations, financial analyses, artificial intelligence, 3D modeling and analysis, image and audiovisual processing, deep learningdata compression and cryptography.
It allows processing of 32 double-precision floating point operations and 64 single-precision floating point operations per clock cycle in 512-bit vectors. At the same time, Intel says it doubles the width of data registers, the number of registers, and the width of FMA units compared to the AVX2.
“Ryzen 7000” versions of emulators?
Thought for the performance needs of so-called superior calculations, the AVX-512 instructions can however be used for many other tasks and emulation enthusiasts know it well.
Several developers have thus decided to associate these instructions with very fashionable emulators such as Yuzu (Nintendo Switch), Citra (Nintendo 3DS), Vita3K (PlayStation Vita) or even Xenia (Microsoft Xbox 360). Each time, the results would have been “ very convincing “. Thus, in the case of RPCS3 (PlayStation 3), the AVX-512 leads to a performance improvement of around 30% compared to the AVX2.
Integrated in Rocket Lake processors and, in a roundabout way, in Alder Lake, the AVX-512 instruction set should however disappear from Intel CPUs with the release of Raptor Lake. The American has always had the idea of reserving these instructions for data center type platforms, for example, and the AVX-512 should only be available in the future on Sapphire Rapids processors.
Well, that’s on the Intel supply side. Indeed, perhaps AMD felt the wind was changing, but when it officially unveiled its Ryzen 7000s, it confirmed support for AVX-512 on processors and the AM5 platform in general. It would therefore seem that the future range could become the darling of emulation enthusiasts.
Source : WCCFTech
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