There are currently no mainstream general-purpose

processors Processor may refer to: Computing Hardware * Processor (computing) ** Central processing unit (CPU), the hardware within a computer that executes a program *** Microprocessor, a central processing unit contained on a single integrated circuit ( ...

built to operate on 512-bit integers or addresses, though a number of processors do operate on 512-bit data.

Representation

A 512-bit register can store 2⁵¹² different values. The range of

integer An integer is the number zero (0), a positive natural number (1, 2, 3, ...), or the negation of a positive natural number (−1, −2, −3, ...). The negations or additive inverses of the positive natural numbers are referred to as negative in ...

values that can be stored in 512 bits depends on the integer representation used. The maximum value of a signed 512-bit integer is , written in decimal as (approximately ).

Hardware

The Intel

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and applicati ...

has a vector processing unit with 512-bit vector registers, each one holding sixteen

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in a maximum of 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform la ...

elements or eight

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

elements, and one instruction can operate on all these values in parallel. However, the Xeon Phi's vector processing unit does not operate on individual numbers that are 512 bits long. Some GPUs, such as the

Advanced Micro Devices Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a Information technology, hardware and F ...

(AMD) Radeon HD 2900XT, the

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

GTX 280, GTX 285, Quadro FX 5800, and several

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla is the former name for a line of products developed by Nvidia targeted at stream processing or GPGPU, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began us ...

products, move data across a 512-bit memory bus. Then AMD Radeon R9 290, R9 290X and 295X2 followed.

AVX-512 AVX-512 are 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit Advanced Vector Extensions SIMD instructions for x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) proposed by Intel in July 2013, and first implemented in the 2016 Intel Xeon Phi x200 (Knights Landing), and then ...

are 512-bit extensions to the 256-bit

Advanced Vector Extensions Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX, also known as Gesher New Instructions and then Sandy Bridge New Instructions) are SIMD extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They w ...

SIMD instructions for x86

instruction set architecture In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, ...

proposed by Intel in July 2013, and released in 2016 with Knights Landing, and in 2017 on the HEDT and consumer server platform, with Skylake-X and Skylake-SP respectively.

Software

Many

hash functions A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values, though there are some hash functions that support variable-length output. The values returned by a hash function are called ''hash values'', ...

, such as

SHA-512 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression ...

and

SHA3-512 SHA-3 (Secure Hash Algorithm 3) is the latest member of the Secure Hash Algorithm family of standards, released by NIST on August 5, 2015. Although part of the same series of standards, SHA-3 is internally different from the MD5-like struct ...

, have a 512-bit output.

References

{{Processor technologies Data unit