With its "Zen" CPU microarchitecture, AMD removed support for the FMA4 instruction-set, on paper. This, while retaining FMA3. Level1Techs discovered that "Zen" CPUs do support FMA4 instructions, even through the instruction-set is not exposed to the operating system. FMA, or fused multiply add, is an efficient way to compute linear algebra. FMA3 and FMA4 are not generations of the instruction-set (unlike SSE3 and SSE4), but rather the digit denotes the number of operands per instruction. Support for both were introduced by AMD in 2012 with its FX-series processors, while Intel added FMA3 support in 2013 with "Haswell."

The exact reasons why AMD deprecated FMA4 with "Zen" are unknown, but some developers speculate it's because AMD's implementation of FMA4 is buggy, even though it's more efficient (33% more throughput). Intel's adoption of FMA3 made it more popular, and hence more stable over the years. Level1Techs used an OpenBLAS FMA4 test-program to confirm that feeding "Zen" processors with FMA4 instructions won't just return a "illegal instruction" error, but also the processor will go ahead and complete the operation. This is interesting because FMA4 isn't exposed as a CPUID bit, and the operating system has no idea the processor even supports the instruction. For linear algebra, FMA4 has proven more efficient than AVX in both single- and double-precision.

It would seem like companies MSI and SteelSeries are reaching a somewhat strategic partnership when it comes to lighting up your PC and peripherals of choice. As you are all well aware, most companies now offer products with RGB lighting, from motherboards to AIOs and RAM. We covered SteelSeries' own QcK Prism mouse mat some days ago, and you would think the folks at MSI were impressed by SteelSeries' RGB "savoir-faire."

MSI is allowing you to control LED lighting on only one of their motherboards for now - the Z270 Gaming Pro Carbon. This looks like a tentative partnership, for now, but could soon be expanded to more RGB-equipped MSI motherboards. SteelSeries' Engine 3 (SSE3) is the application, developed by SteelSeries, that will allow you to sync your motherboard's lighting with that of your other SteelSeries peripherals, ensuring a single "LED lighting language" across your desk space. The two main lighting features of SSE3 are PrismSync and GameSense. PrismSync controls all the lighting effects in the usual "choose your own color" metric, while GameSense dynamically adjusts lighting effects according to what's happening on your games of choice, like syncing colors to your in-game health or other metrics. This is yet another step towards the integration of LED lighting in our daily computing lives. At least now you can control all LED lighting from different manufacturers (well, just two manufacturers, really) through a single application. Exciting times.