I don’t know the terms of Apple’s license with ARM, do you? I’m quite interested.

Given that Apple was one of the original founders of ARM it’s quite possible that their license allows much more latitude anyone else’s.

Adding new instructions to userspace programs is almost certainly not going to fly. All of their extensions have been hidden behind an opaque API, or limited to use in the kernel.

That… makes no architectural difference at all. As far as the architecture is concerned, these are architectural extensions either way: userspace programs can observably contain and execute instructions which are not standard ARM.

If AMX is allowed under their license, there is no reason why checked extensions would not be.

Apple benefits from compatibility with the ARM ecosystem, but there’s no downsides (from their perspective) from extending it. Their chips are “Apple Silicon”, setting the stage for forging ahead alone. I think it’s a card they hold in reserve, to be played when the time is right, like the Intel transition.

I'm not familiar with ARM ISA, but from the godbolt disassembly, it doesn't look like anything special going on here - just the ASM being generated. What's happening here is it just does the add, jumps on overflow flag set to an invalid opcode...

The suggestion was a custom instruction or architectural extension to have this happen in hardware, rather than needing to write out extra code for this.