Similarities Between an AVX-512 Instruction and Amiga Graphics Hardware Permalink

Arnaud Carré:

The Commodore Amiga 500 had a blitter chip. Its main function was to move bitmap graphics from one location to another while applying logical operations. The Amiga’s blitter could handle up to three bitmap sources at once and perform logical operations between them. To specify which operation to use, you needed to set an 8-bit value in the chip, known as the “minterm.”

Three bitmap sources and an 8-bit value to control logical combinations! Doesn’t that sound like a primitive version of the modern AVX vpternlogd instruction?

An unexpected correlation between a particular AVX-512 instruction and 35 year old Amiga graphics hardware.