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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

SSE2 is the latest instruction set supported by all Intel/AMD processors from the past 5ish years. It's not remotely esoteric.

As for the "top 8 instructions that matter", you'd be better served by Agner Fog's documentation than any experimental benchmark you can run if that's what you're focused on.

I'm not saying CPU-Z is a useful benchmark to tell you how your system is going to run Excel or some HPC workload. I'm only saying it's not a terrible way to rank CPUs for a fun and is relatively fair as such things go.

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I'm pretty sure the current 32-bit build of CPU-Z does not use any modern SIMD extensions for its benchmark, only pure unadulterated x87 FP instructions. And the results can be hilariously confusing unless you know what is going on.

I use it as a tool to show that a large part of IPC gains over the past 20 years come from new instructions sets and recompiling old code is a must since frequency gains have pretty much peaked.

To be fair, if I just throw some code at my compiler that also won't use and modern SIMD extensions. You either have to write extra code paths, which in most software only happens in imported libraries; or you have to change your compiler options to exclude older processors.

CPU-Zs benchmark is mostly confusing in that it's a benchmark of run-of-the-mill poorly optimized software. In a way that's bad because power users tend to care more about the performance of well-optimzed code; on the other hand seeing the performance difference in naive code is also useful.

5 years? More like 20 years. SSE2 is supported by all 64-bit Intel/AMD CPUs released since about 2005.

20 years is right.

SSE2 has been introduced in Pentium 4, in November 2000, then AMD has made it a standard part of x86-64, with the first Opteron launched in April 2003.

It was SSE2 which made obsolete the 8087/80387 ISA.

The Pentium G6405 was launched in 2021 and only supports SSE:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/201901/...

That literally says it supports SSE4.2, which is newer than SSE2.

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