Originally posted by edwaleni
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Zen from what I hear won't support XOP and maybe not FMA4. XOP is actually a good instruction set and FM4 makes more sense than FMA3 (which has to have several variants because it does not have a forth operator). It's embarrassing that Intel's instruction set up to AVX2 still does not have an unsigned 64-bit SIMD compare operator (unlike XOP) though AVX512 (if we ever get it) will.
But even without XOP and FMA4 there are still reasons you would want to compile different binaries for Intel and AMD. The Bulldozer architecture has several issues with AVX which means you need to treat AVX code for AMD and Intel differently for optimization. So there is a good reason an AMD optimized Linux would be good for the Bulldozer set.
In short as long as AMD fixes its problems with AVX in Zen and Clear Linux uses GCC I think there would be no reason for an AMD version of Linux for Zen (assuming Zen does not introduce any newer and better x86 instructions).
BTW there are some that suspect that the reason we don't have AVX512 now is because Intel has done so much damage to AMD (and AMD made some stupid decisions with the Bulldozer micro-architecture) that they are laying low waiting for AMD to improve with Zen.
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