Streaming SIMD Extensions

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In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in its Pentium III series of central processing units (CPUs) shortly after the appearance of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD's) 3DNow!. SSE contains 70 new instructions (65 unique mnemonics^[1] using 70 encodings), most of which work on single precision floating-point data. SIMD instructions can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing.

Intel's first IA-32 SIMD effort was the MMX instruction set. MMX had two main problems: it re-used existing x87 floating-point registers making the CPUs unable to work on both floating-point and SIMD data at the same time, and it only worked on integers. SSE floating-point instructions operate on a new independent register set, the XMM registers, and adds a few integer instructions that work on MMX registers.

SSE was subsequently expanded by Intel to SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3 and SSE4. Because it supports floating-point math, it had wider applications than MMX and became more popular. The addition of integer support in SSE2 made MMX largely redundant, though further performance increases can be attained in some situations^[when?] by using MMX in parallel with SSE operations.

SSE was originally called Katmai New Instructions (KNI), Katmai being the code name for the first Pentium III core revision. During the Katmai project Intel sought to distinguish it from its earlier product line, particularly its flagship Pentium II. It was later renamed Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions (ISSE^[2]), then SSE.

AMD added a subset of SSE, 19 of them, called new MMX instructions,^[3] and known as several variants and combinations of SSE and MMX, shortly after with the release of the original Athlon in August 1999, see 3DNow! extensions. AMD eventually added full support for SSE instructions, starting with its Athlon XP and Duron (Morgan core) processors.