st: Stata/Mata compiled to leverage latest Intel microarchitecture?

[László Sándor <sandorl@gmail.com>]

I just wonder why I never ran into this: Stata 12 came out when Intel
released their first CPUs using AVX (Stata 13 and AVX2 might both
debut next summer, large integer operations coming later).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions

AVX promises some vectorized applications (including LAPACK which
Stata uses). Did Stata (and Mata compiled code) got faster because of
this? Will it do so later?
(see e.g. http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimize-for-intel-avx-using-intel-math-kernel-librarys-basic-linear-algebra-subprograms-blas-with-dgemm-routine)

Relatedly: was it worth upgrading our CPUs in the last 18 months? Will
it be worth doing so next summer? Or only the number of cores make the
real difference?

I don't see instruction sets, special generations of CPUs mentioned in
the hardware recommendations:
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/windows/hardware-requirements/

Maybe these are more realistic performance improvements than waiting
for the use of the GPU.

Thanks for any news on this,

Laszlo
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