AMD previews new processor extensions

An anonymous reader writes: It has been all over the news today. AMD announced its "x86 extensions for parallelism", a series of x86 extensions to make parallel programming easier. The first extension are the so called lightweight profiling extensions [that] would give software access to information about cache misses and retired instructions so they can optimize data structures for better performance. The specification is here and it has much wider applicability that parallel programming. It can be used to accelerate Java, .Net and dynamic optimizers.