But as we can see in the original article of this thread, software is not making use of those instructions
The article doesn't show that or even come close to it. To measure what instructions software uses, you'd need to measure it at runtime.
The metric of simply counting frequency on disk ignores loops: you might have a single server binary that contains a single AES-NI instruction and conclude this instruction was useless and never used, but if your server spends 50% of its time decrypting SSL connections at high speed, then things look rather different.
The article doesn't show that or even come close to it. To measure what instructions software uses, you'd need to measure it at runtime.
The metric of simply counting frequency on disk ignores loops: you might have a single server binary that contains a single AES-NI instruction and conclude this instruction was useless and never used, but if your server spends 50% of its time decrypting SSL connections at high speed, then things look rather different.