1. Special Instructions for Graphics and Multi-Media
Alexander Blood
David Waterman
CS 350
Dr. Abzug
3DNow!, Advanced 3DNow!, Athlon, and Duron, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Pentium, MMX, SSE, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium IV, and Celeron are trademarks of Intel Corporation.

2. We will be focusing on:
a. Intel's MMX
b. Intel’s SSE (MMX2)
c. AMD's 3DNow!

3. Why Multimedia Instructions?
The main idea behind MMX and all of the new 'Multimedia Instructions Sets' is that a lot of data of the same type is processed
The software normally performs the same action on all of these things when it's processing them
Generally it's faster to deal with many of these things at once than to do them each one after the other

4. What is SIMD?
A SIMD machine takes advantage of a property of the data stream called data parallelism
“Data Parallelism is when you have a large mass of data of a uniform type that needs the same instruction performed on it”

5. Registers can be subdivided into:
How MMX works?
57 new instructions
8 64-bit registers
Registers can be subdivided into:
8 elements x 8-bit integers (packed byte)
4 elements x 16-bit signed or unsigned integers (packed word)
2 elements x 32-bit signed or unsigned integers (packed double word)
Shares registers with floating-point operations

6. MMX Pros and Cons
Pros:
Deals with multiple calculations at once
Can hold different types of data
Cons:
Due to register sharing, cannot perform MMX and floating-point arithmetic at the same time
Requires new compiler to execute MMX instructions
Only works on integer values

7. 3DNow! and Advanced 3DNow!
8 128-bit registers
Backwards compatible with MMX
21 Unique floating-point instructions
24 Additional instructions for Advanced 3DNow!
New instructions allow data to be requested before being used, saving processor time

8. SSE (MMX2)
Additional bit registers for floating-point instructions
128-bit calculations broken down into 2 64-bit calculations
64-bit calculations done separately, can take multiple clock cycles

9. Consumer processors and available SIMD features
AMD
3DNow!
K6-2
K6-3
Advanced 3DNow!
Athlon
Duron
Intel
MMX:
Pentium MMX
Pentium Pro
Pentium II
Celeron
SSE:
Pentium III
Pentium IV
Celeron 2

10. Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Related Links
Intel Corporation
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Ars Technica: 3 1/2 SIMD Architectures
MMX And Beyond