I think the AFFINE and AFFINEINV instructions are specifically for FEC and maybe compression algorithms. I also think they smell like something requested by one of the big customers of Intel (e.g. the government).
Hmm of course erasure codes would always need to solve these problems. Not sure what modern applications need that in the X86 world
I really think it's only AES since thats the only place I've seen that polynomial used. But of course maybe there's an obscure tape backup FEC algo used somewhere in datacenters?
