Bit Manipulation Instructions Sets (BMI sets) are extensions to the x86 instruction set architecture for microprocessors from Intel and AMD. The purpose of these instruction sets is to improve the speed of bit manipulation. All the instructions in these sets are non-SIMD and operate only on general-purpose registers.
There are two sets published by Intel: BMI (here referred to as BMI1) and BMI2; they were both introduced with the Haswell microarchitecture. Another two sets were published by AMD: ABM (Advanced Bit Manipulation, which is also a subset of SSE4a implemented by Intel as part of SSE4.2 and BMI1), and TBM (Trailing Bit Manipulation, an extension introduced with Piledriver-based processors as an extension to BMI1).
In the description of a patch to the GNU binutils package, AMD explicitly revealed that the first iteration of "Zen", its third-generation x86-64 architecture, will not support TBM, XOP and LWP instructions developed specifically for the "Bulldozer" microarchitecture.
ABM is only implemented as a single instruction set by AMD; all AMD processors support both instructions or neither. Intel considers POPCNT
as part of SSE4.2, and LZCNT
as part of BMI1. POPCNT
has a separate CPUID flag; however, Intel uses AMD's ABM
flag to indicate LZCNT
support (since LZCNT
completes the ABM).
LZCNT
is almost identical to the Bit Scan Reverse (BSR
) instruction, but sets the ZF (if the result is zero) and CF (if the source is zero) flags rather than OF, and produces a defined result (the source operand size in bits) if the source operand is zero.