Introduction to the Streaming SIMD Extensions in the Pentium III Processors

New Features of the Pentium IIIThe Pentium III adds two interesting and useful features: the processor serial number and SSE. The CPU serial number has been at the center of a debate about privacy. This article will abstain from the debate, and focus instead on the new SIMD instructions.SSE has an acronym embedded in it: SIMD, which stands for Single Instruction Multiple Data. Usually, processors process one data element in one instruction, a processing style called Single Instruction Single Data, or SISD. In contrast, processors having the SIMD capability process more than one data element in one instruction.3. MMX versus SSEMMX and SSE, both of which are instruction sets that have been added to existing architectures, share the concept of SIMD, but they differ in the data types they handle, and in the way they are supported in the processor.MMX instructions are SIMD for integers, while SSE instructions are SIMD for single-precision floating-point numbers. MMX instructions operate on two 32-bit integers simultaneously, while SSE instructions operate on four 32-bit floats simultaneously