I'm a bit of an idiot, when I think of AVX I think of something that speeds up computation (specifically matrice stuff), not memory access. How wrong am I?
Its registers are just larger. The way x86 moves memory is through registers, register-to-register or register-to/from-memory. The AVX registers move up to 64 bytes in one move. A general purpose register moves at most 8 bytes.
It's a set of SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) extensions to the amd64 instruction set. They allow you to operate on larger chunks of data with a single instruction - for example, do 16 integer multiplications in parallel, etc.
Back in the days, this was on my 486 IIRC, using floating-point to copy was faster than using the regular integer instructions for pretty much the same reason, you could copy 64bit at a time rather than "just" 32bit.
