Nope, PADDW is a variant of PADDSW, so whatever PADDSW does is what matters, and PADDSW does saturating addition.
Or in other words: You are defining "normal" to mean "twos-complement with wrap-around" after all, which makes it rather unsurprising that every "normal" instruction according to your definition turns out to be doing twos-complement addition with wrap-around.
> I thought about calling those out, I think it's stretching too much to refer to an archaic instruction that works on 'ascii' or such when we're figuring the behavior of 'integers'. Even if it is one byte.
Well, packed BCD definitely is not ASCII. Nor twos-complement, nor ones-complement, nor IEEE754. And BCD quite definitely represents a range of the integers.
> Nope, PADDW is a variant of PADDSW, so whatever PADDSW does is what matters, and PADDSW does saturating addition.
That's like arguing that Red Sports Car is a variant of Red Sports Car with Stripes. The one that adds adjectives is the variant, the one without those adjectives is the base.
If PADDW did saturating arithmetic and PADDWW did wrapping, I would agree with you, but that's not how x86 works.
So the original original quote, "on x86 INT_MAX+1==INT_MIN", is true. As far as I can tell.
As I see it that's a variant of PADDW, so whatever PADDW does is what matters, and PADDW does twos complement.
>DAA and AAA
I thought about calling those out, I think it's stretching too much to refer to an archaic instruction that works on 'ascii' or such when we're figuring the behavior of 'integers'. Even if it is one byte.