The Intel P6 core, introduced with the Pentium Pro processor and used in all current Intel processors, features a RISC-like microarchitecture and an out-of-order execution unit, representing a radical shift from previous designs. The P6’s new dynamic execution micro-architecture removes the constraint of linear instruction sequencing between the traditional fetch…
The original version of this article showed how to detect MMX and the early SSE integer instructions with the CPUID instruction. That was enough in 2000, when the practical question was often: “Can I safely execute MMX or SSE code without crashing on this machine?” That question is still valid,…
The latest trend in PC games is 3D graphics: during the past few years, almost all kinds of games have turned to 3D graphics, greatly increasing the demand of processors with strong floating-point performance, because the front end of a typical 3D game software pipeline must perform object physics, geometry…
The Streaming SIMD Extensions enhance the Intel x86 architecture in four ways: 8 new 128-bit SIMD floating-point registers that can be directly addressed; 50 new instructions that work on packed floating-point data; 8 new instructions designed to control cacheability of all MMX and 32-bit x86 data types, including the ability…