Originally Posted by salasi

...you could turn out to be right, but I will have my revenge



Well, when you say Intel's, we already have a problem. Unlike the rest, which were originated by Intel and copied/licensed by other organisations, the x86-64 set was originated by AMD, and hence it is a bit unfair to characterise it as Intel's, even though you could be arguing that it is Intel's because Intel use it. Wrong, though.

The bigger problem though is that is a list of six instruction set extensions and not really instructions sets, or an instruction set, per se.



Mostly, they aren't, or at least not noticeably. For most things, the standard x86 instruction set is used. There are some special cases in which the various SSEs are used, but the ones that I can think of are mostly in things like signal processing which isn't the creation of a programming language compiler or a low level programming project.

You could argue that in using an AMD 64 bit processor in 64 bit mode, you are inherently using the x86-64 instruction set, but from a programmers model point of view that is largely transparent (errr, some of the registers are extended, so there can be an extra issue with initialising the extended length registers if you are writing code that is intended to run
in both 32 bit and 64 bit mode, but I don't think that's what you want to know about).

It may that you have just asked "What is the most common programming language". I'd have to guess its c++ these days, but you'd get a different answer to which language makes it easiest to do something with the extensions directly (assembler) and which produces most stuf that intefaces directly with the user (maybe Java). Something relatively high level like Java probably features a lot in user interface code, but maybe several layers away from where the hardware is really put to work.



If you wanted to write an assembler program to twiddle I/O pins directly, you are probably better off with a knowledge of hardware. Not essential, but helpful. For higher level code it probably makes hardly any difference.

If the question is simply "What should I use to write programs with?" and the stuff about instruction set extensions is just a smokescreen, then you won't get an answer. Rather, you can have any answer you like. You might as well have asked "Which is better a Mac or a PC?" It'll start a fight or two, but it won't help you much.



Me both. Too kind. If not three.

Originally Posted by salasi

Given that the question that you asked was almost entirely irrelevant to what you say that wanted to know, I am a bit surprised to find out that you have been much helped. But if it helps, it helps.

You have asked about the SIMD extensions and AFAIK (and I'm pretty sure of this) not one of the things that you mentioned is used in an Altair.



No. It didn't tell you. You didn't ask about that. You didn't ask anything even vaguely related to that. I'd say that it was almost impossible to guess that this was something that you would have wanted to know from your question.

I'm still not clear why you think that technology introduced from, say 1995 to 200x, is involved in work done in the early 1980s or maybe even the late 70s. Even if the technology had been available at the time, neither the emulating device nor the device being emulated would have been x86 devices, so its difficult to see why you would focus on x86 instruction set add-ons. That just seems irrelevant.



I'm not sure whether you are the first person to have said that, but if that is your immediate objective, you do have to understand that you are quite some way from being able to achieve it. Good Luck!