SIMD
SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) is a set of operations for efficiently handling large amounts of data in parallel. 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 AMDs 3DNow! and Intels MMX and SSE sets in their various versions.
MMX
MMX 2
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.
