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Intel gives Microsoft an Edge

by on22 May 2015


And they can keep him

It is starting to look like the glorious WinTel alliance which once ruled the known world is back together, if you look at what has been the secret sauce behind Microsoft's new Edge Browser it turns out that it is Intel,

The Edge is proving to be rather good and it appears that the reason is that Intel gave its former ally a hand.

According to the Microsoft Edge Dev blog:

 "Intel has been contributing to Chakra, the JavaScript engine for Microsoft Edge (and previously Internet Explorer), since 2012, bringing their expertise in web runtime development and JIT code generation."

Chipzilla has been offering significant contributions to open source projects like WebKit, Blink, Gecko but this time Redmond has been helped out with performance-based improvements to the Edge browser.

Microsoft and Intel began their collaboration with Chakra back in the days of Windows 8.1. Intel offered direct contributions to the Chakra JIT compiler to include better scheduling and instruction selections. In Windows 10,

Intel engineers are working closely with Microsoft to deliver Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD).
By using SIMD Edge will result in much faster code execution. This process becomes useful when the browser is processing multimedia, games, and other resource-intensive applications.

Microsoft wanted to combine this technology with others like asm.js to spike JavaScript performance at near native speeds.

SIMD is only for a limited subset of scenarios that use asm.js and are running on x86 and x64 hardware. Both Intel and Microsoft teams want to expand them in support of Chakra and Microsoft Edge.

Also in regards to SIMD, Intel has helped with the performance improvements to the graphics layout and other subsystems of Microsoft Edge. Chipzilla was optimized the navigation time for pages containing several inline elements and optimization to reduce DOM parse for text-area elements.

Last modified on 22 May 2015
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