Specialized Evolution of the General Purpose CPU.

Commodity general-purpose CPUs remain the predominant computing platform for servers. However, these CPUs continuously evolve, incorporating increasingly specialized primitives to keep up with the evolving need of critical workloads. Specialization includes support for floating-point and vectors, compression, encryption, and synchronization and threading. These CPUs now have sufficient specialized support that the term general-purpose can often be misleading. Recent announcements such as a server product with an FPGA integrated with a CPU make the possibilities even more intriguing. This paper discusses the evolution of specialization in commodity general-purpose CPUs, trade-offs from an industrial perspective, and the opportunities for software going forward.