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Comment by svnpenn | Hacker News Reader

I saw this once before, and both times, it's pretty shocking. Is this really something that needs to be inside the CPU itself? I don't want my CPU doing this. I would rather just take the performance hit and keep the CPU "dumb".

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Are you saying you don't want your CPU to have SIMD/vector capabilities, or you want it to have a limited SIMD instruction set without the extra flexibility that AVX-512 brings, or have you wildly misinterpreted the headline (twice?) to assume that AVX-512 adds special-purpose instructions for Unicode conversions?

Any instructions beyond NAND are clearly bloat.

I think the parent must not understand what SIMD/vector operations are, and probably thinks there is native Unicode support in the CPU. At least, that’s my most favorable interpretation of his critique.

> keep the CPU "dumb".

a 240+ entry reorder buffer has entered the chat.

> keep the CPU "dumb"

Users started dumb, develooers became dumb, now you want CPUs dumb too? Who will deal with the consequences??

x86 CPUs have been essentially black magic for a while now. If anything, what's described here is on the dumber side for things an x86 CPU from the past decade or two is doing behind the scenes to operate as fast as it does.

You can have "dumb" CPUs all you want, just stick with Z80, 6502, 6809. There's still plenty of fun using those and you can hold most of what they do in your head. Add 68000 and MIPS R2000 for some 32 bit fun if you wish. Anything past that level of tech uses brainy tricks to get the performance going.

This is a dumb feature for a modern CPU, the really smart part is out-of-order execution and other optimizations that CPU's do behind the scenes

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