Remember when Intel released their MMX instruction set for the Pentium line of processors? This was still way back when they had those bunny suit guys for their commercials. Anyways, these instructions are actually a form of SIMD extensions, which stand for Single Instruction Multiple Data, and, like the name suggest, are a set of instructions built-into the processor that can be used over and over again very efficiently for different pieces of data. MMX had 57 of these instructions, but, unfortunately, were rarely supported by applications and proved to be quite useless in most cases.

AMD then later released their own set of SIMD instructions with their 3DNow!, which they first introduced into their K6-2 and later in their Athlon. 3DNow!, unlike MMX, which were integer SIMD extensions, are a set of floating point SIMD extensions. As many of you might already know, floating point calculations are used extensively in 3D games and many professional-level applications, so having a performance improvement with these applications is very important.

Intel's version of floating point SIMD extensions, called SSE or Streaming SIMD Extensions, came with their release of the Pentium III. Now, let's recall to the pre-Coppermine Pentium III. Back then, it seemed that the Pentium III was almost identical to its Pentium II sibling, except for the SSE that the former supported. Their implementation of SSE, however, did prove to be useful as many witnessed how the Pentium III had a performance advantage over the Pentium II and Athlon processors with applications and games that supported SSE, such as Quake III: Arena.

The Pentium 4 now includes 144 more instructions than the first incarnation of Intel's SSE. Dubbed SSE2, it should provide even more of a performance boost when it's supported by software. Fortunately, as seen with SSE, it seems that many developers are relatively quick to adapt Intel's SIMD extension instructions as to AMD's 3DNow!.

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