Microprocessor with vector instructions is going to be the big thing for the future. Why? Because self-driving, speech recognition, image recognition are all based on machine learning and machine learning is all about matrices and vectors.

We have been banging our heads in the wall trying to eek out more performance for years ever since we semi-officially declared Moore’s laws to be over. In the golden old days of microprocessor design, we could simply double the clock frequency of the CPU each year and boom everybody was happy. That wonderful old trick is over.

All of the tricks really boil down to one central idea: Trying to find ways of doing work in parallel.

SIMD instructions such as Neon, MMX, SSE2 and AVX have worked great in multimedia applications. Doing things like video-encoding e.g. But we need to to squeeze out more performance in more areas. Vector instructions offer a lot more flexibility in taking almost any loop and turning it into vector instructions. However there are lots of different ways of going about this.

RISC-V vector instructions: RISC-V Vector Instructions vs ARM and x86 SIMD.

ARM vector instructions: ARMv9: What is the Big Deal?.

ARM and RISC-V actually follow a profoundly different strategy. See how – read more in the article here by Erik Engheim.