Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)
Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) expand the entire x86 instruction set with access to more registers and adds various new features that improve general-purpose performance.
You have to know assembly for it to mean too much, but it helps to understand the history, which it gives a bit of on the page. Originally x86 had 8 16-bit registers, which are like variables. So if you wanted to have nine variables, you'd have to push one to the stack in RAM. When they switched to 64-bit, they also doubled the number to 16 64-bit registers. Now intel is doubling it again to 32 64-bit registers.
They're also adding a lot more functions to their assembly, but I haven't looked at them yet and those would be harder to explain. But if the CPU implements a function directly, that saves on cycles because you don't have to call multiple other functions to do the same thing.
