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SIMD

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First introduced on the Illiac IV, and not to be confused with vector processing.

Data Types (taken from SSE specs)

These do not necessarily map to the C data types of the same name, for any given compiler!

  • half precision: 16-bit IEEE 754 floating-point (bias-15) (IEEE 754 2008 binary16)
  • single: 32-bit IEEE 754 floating-point (bias-127) (IEEE 754 2008 binary32)
  • double: 64-bit IEEE 754 floating-point (bias-1023) (IEEE 754 2008 binary64)
  • long double: 80-bit "double extended" IEEE 754-1985 floating-point (bias-16383)
    • not an actual SIMD type, but an artifact of x87
  • word: 32-bit two's complement integer
  • doubleword, dword: 64-bit two's complement integer

x86 XMM

The Streaming SIMD Extensions operate on the 128-bit XMM registers (XMM0..XMM7 in 32-bit mode, XMM0..XMM15 in 64-bit mode). In its original incarnation on the PIII, execution units (but not registers) were shared with the x87 floating-point architecture. The execution units were separated in the NetBurst microarchitecture. In the Core microarchitecture, the execution engine has been widened for greater SSE throughput.

SSE5 (AMD)

  • Unimplemented extensions competing with SSE4, encoded using a method incompatible with VEX
  • Withdrawn, converted into VEX-compatible encodings, and split into:
    • FMA4: Fused floating-point multiply-add (compare Intel's FMA)
    • XOP: Fused integer multiply-add, byte permutations, shifts, rotates, integer vector horizontal operations (compare Intel's SSE4)
    • CVT16: Half-precision conversion

SSE4 (Intel)

SSE4.1

DPPD instruction dataflow
  • Introduced on Penryn
  • dpps -- dot product of two vectors having four single components each
  • dppd -- dot product of two vectors having two double components each
  • insertps

SSE4.2

Intel Nehalem microarchitecture
  • Introduced on Nehalem
  • crc32
  • pcmpestri
  • pcmpestrm
  • pcmpistri
  • pcmpistrm
  • pcmpgtq
  • popcnt

SSE4a (AMD)

  • lzcnt
  • popcnt
  • extrq
  • insertq
  • movntsd
  • movntss

SSE3 (PNI)

  • Originally known as Prescott New Instructions, and introduced on P4-Prescott
  • movddup -- move a double from a 8-byte-aligned memory location or lower half of XMM register to upper half, then duplicate upper half to lower half

SSSE3 (TNI/MNI)

  • Introduced with the Core microarchitecture. Sometimes referred to as Tejas New Instructions or Merom New Instructions
  • pmaddwd -- multiply packed words, then horizontally sum pairs, accumulating into doublewords

SSE2

  • Introduced with the P4.
  • Extends the MMX instructions to XMM registers.
  • movapd -- move two packed doubles from a 16-byte-aligned memory location to XMM registers, or vice versa, or between two XMM registers.
    • movupd -- movapd safe for unaligned memory references, with far inferior performance.
  • mulpd -- multiply two packed doubles. the multiplier is a 16-byte-aligned memory location or XMM register. the target XMM register serves as the multiplicand.
  • addpd -- add two packed doubles. the addend is a 16-byte-aligned memory location or XMM register. the target XMM register serves as the augend.

SSE (KNI/ISSE)

  • Introduced with the PIII. Sometimes referred to as Katmai New Instructions, and branded for some time as the Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions
  • movaps -- move four packed singles from a 16-byte-aligned memory location to XMM registers, or vice versa, or between two XMM registers.
    • movups -- movaps safe for unaligned memory references, with far inferior performance.
  • mulps -- multiply four packed singles. the multiplier is a 16-byte-aligned memory location or XMM register. the target XMM register serves as the multiplicand.
  • addps -- add four packed singles. the addend is a 16-byte-aligned memory location or XMM register. the target XMM register serves as the augend.

Future Directions

  • AVX (Advanced Vector eXtensions) -- to be introduced on Intel's Sandy Bridge (2010) and AMD's Bulldozer (2011), and implemented within the VEX coding scheme
  • The FMA instruction set extension to x86 should hit around 2011, providing floating-point fused multiply-add
    • AMD appears to call this FMA4, part of what was SSE5

x87 MMX

MMX (Intel)

3DNow! (AMD)

Other Architectures

  • PowerPC implements AltiVec
  • SPARC implements VIS, the Visual Instruction Set
  • PA-RISC implements MAX, the Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions
  • ARM implements NEON
  • Alpha implemented MVI, the Motion Video Instructions
  • SWAR: SIMD Within a Register (bit-parallel methods)

See Also