Given Intel's close relationship with un-named agencies, how do you know that bit reverse, and a lot of other instructions, aren't already "standard" (but whose existence is classified) ? So long as an instruction doesn't require new datapaths, it would be nearly impossible to notice its existence in a chip mask. The existence of the AES instruction is an obvious (unclassified) example of this type of extension. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set There are companies that can reverse engineer chips by shaving them layer by layer, and eventually reconstruct their netlists. But this may be quite difficult at the bleeding edge of the latest technologies. It may well be that there are a number of Snowden disclosures that appear so bizarre that the journalists can't figure out what they mean; references to obscure instructions might well fall into this class. At 02:03 PM 3/28/2014, Eugene Salamin wrote:
Due to it's utility in FFT, I'm surprised that bit reverse is not a standard instruction.