Microsoft has started laying the groundwork for Intel’s Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) inside Windows 11, adding an experimental toggle for the instruction set architecture in a recent Insider preview build.
The new setting, discovered in experimental build 29295, has no immediate impact because compatible hardware does not yet exist on the market. Once supported processors arrive, the toggle is designed to boost application performance, though software developers will still need to recompile their programs with specific compiler flags to utilize the instructions. Toolchains including GCC, LLVM, and MSVC have already begun integrating APX support.
Intel introduced APX in 2023, expanding the standard Intel 64 baseline by doubling general-purpose registers from 16 to 32. The update also implements three-operand instruction formats with dedicated data destination registers for integer tasks. According to Intel, software compiled for the new extensions can execute with 10 percent fewer loads and 20 percent fewer stores than typical Intel 64 code.
Hardware capable of taking advantage of the Windows 11 toggle remains several years away. Intel is expected to introduce APX to consumers in early 2027 with its Nova Lake Core Ultra 400-series processors, starting with a 28-core chip ahead of an anticipated 52-core model. APX is also slated to appear in data centers that same year aboard Intel’s Xeon 7 “Diamond Rapids” processors, which scale up to 256 cores.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
