Today Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for general download. This new update contains some notable features like basic HTML5 support in the editor, a stand-alone help viewer, Silverlight 4 Tools, a Silverlight performance wizard, and MFC support for animation and Direct2D hardware acceleration for GPUs (such as the AMD Radeon™ graphics card line).  In addition, there are a number of notable improvements throughout the Visual Studio product to enhance stability and performance.

While Service Pack 1 primarily addresses a number of issues found in the original release, one significant new feature is support for the latest instruction set extensions in the upcoming AMD core codenamed “Bulldozer”, which will be available later this year.  Developers will now be able to natively use the new XOP, FMA4 and AVX instructions in a wide variety of application categories to help improve performance: video encoding and transcoding, floating point intensive applications such as multimedia and 3D modeling,  HPC, and compute-intensive data applications. This is made possible because these instructions help improve application performance by using the CPU for data level parallelism, providing hardware assistance for complex software tasks and adding 256-bit functionality to certain operations.  Support for the new instructions is available in Service Pack 1 via intrinsics, masm, and inline asm.

Note that in order to use the new instructions, it will be necessary to install SP1 for Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  This operating system Service Pack contains the necessary support to save and restore extended context used by XOP, FMA4 and AVX instructions.

We’re excited to have support for “Bulldozer” in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and look forward to applications utilizing XOP!

We want to hear from you – post a comment to let us know how support for the latest instructions can help your applications shine.

Robin Maffeo is a Software Engineering Manager on the Microsoft team at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.