Difference between revisions of "SIMD"

From ThinkWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Line 5: Line 5:
 
==MMX==
 
==MMX==
 
MMX is a SIMD instruction introduced by Intel with the Pentium line of processors. It provides integer operations only and has a strong limitation in that it makes it difficult to work with integer and floating point data at the same time, since it reuses the IA-32 FPU registers.
 
MMX is a SIMD instruction introduced by Intel with the Pentium line of processors. It provides integer operations only and has a strong limitation in that it makes it difficult to work with integer and floating point data at the same time, since it reuses the IA-32 FPU registers.
 
==3DNow!==
 
  
 
==SSE==
 
==SSE==
Line 16: Line 14:
 
==SSE 3==
 
==SSE 3==
 
SSE 3 extends the SSE 2 command set by 13 instrucions for converting floating point numbers into integer numbers, for complex arithmetics, video encoding, image processing and thread communications.
 
SSE 3 extends the SSE 2 command set by 13 instrucions for converting floating point numbers into integer numbers, for complex arithmetics, video encoding, image processing and thread communications.
 +
 +
 +
[[Category:Glossary]]

Revision as of 00:36, 7 August 2005

SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) is a set of operations for efficiently handling large amounts of data. It makes it possible to execute one command on a set of data instances instead of having the same command to be executed on each of the data instances.

First introduced in large-scale supercomputers SIMD instrucion sets have become popular in personal computing hardware, hence being mostly associated with these units. The most widely known SIMD instructions sets are AIMs (Apple-IBM-Motorola) AltiVec for the PowerPC, AMDs 3DNow! and Intels MMX and SSE sets in their various versions.

MMX

MMX is a SIMD instruction introduced by Intel with the Pentium line of processors. It provides integer operations only and has a strong limitation in that it makes it difficult to work with integer and floating point data at the same time, since it reuses the IA-32 FPU registers.

SSE

SSE is a set of instuctions optimized for handling floating point operations on a 128 bit level.

SSE 2

SSE 2 contains 144 new commands for Cache and Memory management and the 64 bit commands of the MMX set were improved and extended to 128 bit.

SSE 3

SSE 3 extends the SSE 2 command set by 13 instrucions for converting floating point numbers into integer numbers, for complex arithmetics, video encoding, image processing and thread communications.