Fans of Linux have some good news today from Phoronix involving Advanced Vector Extensions the successor to the SSE4 instruction set.  We are still waiting on AMD’s first part to arrive on the market while not only has Intel released a part that can handle the new technology, Linux is now able to take advantage of that with the new GCC 4.6.  You can see how well the support has been implemented by reading through the variety of benchmarks in the full article.

“While we are still battling issues with the Intel Linux graphics driver in getting that running properly with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge CPUs (at least Intel’s Jesse Barnes is now able to reproduce the most serious problem we’ve been facing, but we’ll save the new graphics information for another article), the CPU performance continues to be very compelling. Two weeks ago we published the Intel Core i5 2500K Linux benchmarks that showed just how well this quad-core CPU that costs a little more than $200 USD is able to truly outperform previous generations of Intel hardware. That was just with running the standard open-source benchmarks and other Linux software, which has not been optimized for Intel’s latest micro-architecture. Version 4.6 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) though is gearing up for release and it will bring support for the AVX extensions. In this article, we are benchmarking GCC 4.6 on a Sandy Bridge system to see what benefits there are to enabling the Core i7 AVX optimizations.”

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