AVXAVX2AVX512

AVXAVX2AVX512 refers to the successive x86 instruction-set extensions known as AVX, AVX2, and AVX-512. These extensions provide wide-vector processing capabilities intended to accelerate data-parallel workloads by performing arithmetic on multiple data elements in a single instruction. They are widely discussed as a progression of AVX technology and are supported by Intel and, to varying extents, by AMD CPUs.

AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) introduced 256-bit vector registers, designated as YMM, and used VEX-encoded instructions. This design enables more efficient three-operand forms and improves throughput for floating-point operations over prior SIMD extensions, such as SSE. AVX laid the groundwork for broader parallelism in consumer and server processors.

AVX2, released with the Haswell generation, expands AVX by bringing comprehensive 256-bit integer operations and enhanced memory data movement. It adds extensive support for integer arithmetic on 256-bit lanes, introduces gather and blend operations, and broadens permutation and data-shuffling capabilities, enabling more code to run entirely in SIMD without separate scalar fallbacks.

AVX-512 extends the width to 512 bits, introducing ZMM registers and a family of instructions built around EVEX encoding. It adds per-lane masking with mask registers, enhanced gather/scatter, and a larger set of vector operations, allowing more aggressive parallelism for workloads such as scientific computing, cryptography, and multimedia processing. AVX-512 features vary by microarchitecture and can impact power consumption and thermal design.

Implementation and usage: Compilers provide flags to enable these features (for example, -mavx, -mavx2, -mavx512f), and runtime detection is common to select optimized code paths for the executing processor.