st: Intel advances and Stata 13+

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I thought of the occasional geeky messages and blog posts from Bill
and others from StataCorp when I read the following about the imminent
new Intel chips. In case people are interested, I repeat my comment
from the Stata Blog:

"On the floating point side, Intel's new Fused Multiply Add (FMA)
extension includes both 256-bit and 128-bit instructions. Compared to
the conventional separate multiply and add instructions in SSE, FMA
doubles the theoretical throughput. In addition, the fused
instructions eliminate the intermediate rounding stage which can
improve accuracy for some approximation algorithms."
Would this change anything for Stata? (Not before Stata 14 anyway, I am afraid.)
More here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/a-look-at-haswell/
(I also wonder if AVX2 and TSX changes anything.)

I know the drill: no comments on future products from StataCorp. But
maybe there is any technical point to comment? For one, I would love
to know more whether my Stata would get faster over the summer. (Even
existing versions, even?)

Thanks!

Laszlo
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