When AMD published the x86-64 standard in 1999, little did they know they were inventing what would become the de-facto architecture for server CPUs. But the CPUs of today aren’t the same as ones produced 20 years back – as they have extensions for everything from Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) to Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VT-d).
InterSystems would like to take better advantage of these new extensions in upcoming versions of InterSystems IRIS. While our compilers are smart enough to create optimized code for many situations, some optimizations can only be turned on by explicitly cutting off support for processors that do not have that instruction set. Additionally, we are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain older CPU models to test on.