RE: Popcount optimization using AVX512

> -----Original Message-----
>
> Cool.  I think we should run the benchmarks again to be safe, though.

Ok, sure go ahead. :)

> >> I forgot to mention that I also want to understand whether we can
> >> actually assume availability of XGETBV when CPUID says we support
> >> AVX512:
> >
> > You cannot assume as there are edge cases where AVX-512 was found on
> > system one during compile but it's not actually available in a kernel
> > on a second system at runtime despite the CPU actually having the
> > hardware feature.
>
> Yeah, I understand that much, but I want to know how portable the XGETBV
> instruction is.  Unless I can assume that all x86_64 systems and compilers
> support that instruction, we might need an additional configure check and/or
> CPUID check.  It looks like MSVC has had support for the _xgetbv intrinsic for
> quite a while, but I'm still researching the other cases.

I see google web references to the xgetbv instruction as far back as 2009 for Intel 64 bit HW and 2010 for AMD 64bit
HW,maybe you could test for _xgetbv() MSVC built-in. How far back do you need to go? 

Thanks,
Paul