AMD's new SSE5 x86 instruction set extensions

If you have followed Intel's and AMD's competition lately, you might have noticed that as well as in the number of cores, clock speeds and cache sizes, the processor giants also compete in instruction sets. Previously, it has been Intel who decides the additions to the x86 instruction set (except maybe AMD's 3DNow), but AMD is following suit by announcing SSE5 extensions.

These new instructions are exciting, especially at these times when multimedia and rich user interfaces are here to stay and more important than ever. However, if Intel and AMD compete too much in instruction sets, I'm afraid we all loose, since if you want to write fast and generic code, you must leave the latest and greatest additions away. But I wouldn't mind seeing SSE5 support in .NET's JIT compiler/CLR, future DirectX versions, and last but not least, Intel processors.