Hi Igor,
Sandy Bridge will not have FMA, it's targeted for a future processor. I apologize if there is any confusion I (or Intel) caused. In our defense, we did discuss feature timing in the last two Intel developer forums (and now to my embarrassment, I see that presentation has been removed from the IDF content catalog at
http://www.intel.com/idf , we'll have it up in time for the upcoming IDF on Oct 20). And it's on a separate CPUID feature flag (separate section of the document too ) in the programming reference.
Anyway, enough for my justifications. There is no intent to 'market' here, we're just engineers: Our strategy going forward is to disclose the industry early on our directions, first to get feedback on the value (and definition) of features like wider vectors, FMA, new instructions, and secondly to get software ready as early as possible. From your perspective is this the right strategy, or are we just confusing people? (and for anyone else reading this: While I appreciate the private mails, I especially like feedback discussions to happen in public forums...). So far I have collected a lot of feedback on the definition and direction and we hope to provide some public response to it shortly.
It sounds like you are an FMA supporter - beyond the raw FLOPS improvement, do you have any sensitivity to the numerical advantages FMA can provide? There are obviously a lot of tradeoffs in the implementations we can provide, and having some data to understand how you would use it would be very helpful.
Regards,
Mark Buxton