Intel's APX offers 'better performance' in Windows 11 according to new Insider setting

A new "Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)" option has been spotted in a version of Windows 11 made available to Windows Insiders on October 23, with the feature set to enable a boost in application performance on compatible chips. At the moment, those chips don't exist. But when they do, this feature is the one that you'll want to flick on if you're using one of them. The new toggle was reported by Neowin after it was first spotted by a poster on the X social network. The feature debuted in build 29295 as an Experimental build, so it's unlikely that it will make its way to the version of publicly available Windows 11 anytime soon.

Intel announced APX back in 2023, confirming that it features 16 additional general-purpose registers and three-operand instruction formats with a new data destination register for many integer instructions. Doubling the number of general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 will allow code compiled with APX to run with 10% fewer loads and 20% fewer stores than Intel 64's baseline, says Intel. APX has been available in the GCC compiler since version 14, with subsequent versions up to GCC 17, which is targeting a 2027 code freeze, adding additional support. LLVM and MSVC have preliminary support, as well. Although enablement has been going steady for the past two years, developers will still need to recompile their applications with the proper flags for APX-capable CPUs to leverage those instructions.

Not that there's any real need to rush just yet. The fact that no APX-capable chips are on sale yet means that enabling the feature in Windows 11 build 29295 does nothing currently. But it's clear that Microsoft is getting its ducks in a row ahead of time. Intel's Nova Lake Core Ultra 400-series chips are expected to be the first to feature APX support, but they won't break cover until early 2027. Even then, it's likely that the 28-core version will debut first, with the 52-core model made to wait until later in the year. These are consumer chips, of course, with Intel's Xeon 7 'Diamond Rapids' bringing APX support and up to 256 cores to the data center, also in 2027.

The good news is that you might not have to buy a new chip to enjoy improved Windows 11 performance. Five years after Windows 11's debut, Microsoft has already said that it's working to make its operating system play more nicely with machines with just 8GB of RAM. But what Microsoft gives with one hand, it soon takes away: an expansion of the Windows 11 Memory Integrity feature will reduce gaming performance on some systems.

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