Late last year, Intel and AMD founded x86 ecosystem advisory group (EAG) to keep the x86 ISA growing and thriving in the era where Arm and RISC-V are expanding their presence. A year later, the hard work of Intel and AMD engineers is coming to a fruition. According to new blog posts by both x86 ecosystem advisory group founders, new instructions are being added as of now to harder the security layer and increase the vector and matrix performance. First in line is the new FRED (Flexible Return and Event Delivery) instruction, designed as a new modernized and standardized interrupt model to reduce latency in software and improve reliability in software. In addition to FRED, instructions such as AVX10 and ACE (Advanced Matrix Extensions for Matrix Multiplication) are now standardized and implemented across the stack, meaning that we now have standardized way to accelerate matrix multiplication, as well as 512-bit vector extensions.

Perhaps the most interesting and the most important part of this update is the ChkTag for x86 memory safety. ChkTag is a new x86 memory-tagging instruction set that helps catch common memory-safety bugs such as buffer overflows and use-after-free by attaching small tags to memory and checking them in hardware. It gives developers and compilers fine-grained control over which accesses are checked, so tools can enable protections where they matter most without the heavy overhead of software-only approaches. That makes it practical for hardening applications, kernels, hypervisors and even firmware, while ChkTag-enabled binaries can still run on older processors that lack the hardware features, which eases deployment. The designers intend ChkTag to complement existing defenses like shadow stacks and confidential computing, and the full specification is expected later this year.