The Sse Provides a Rich Set of Instructions to Meet the Requirements of Demanding

0272-1732/00/$10.00  2000 IEEE In the volume PC market, the demand is growing for general-purpose processors that facilitate visual and graphical computing on the Internet. Responding to this need, Intel developed the streaming SIMD extensions (SSE), a set of processor instructions designed to boost performance of multimedia and Internet applications, and implemented them on its Pentium III processor. The main challenge in implementing the Pentium III was to provide enhanced support for multimedia applications through the SSE while adhering to aggressive die size, frequency, and schedule goals. At the heart of several visual and graphical computing algorithms are floating-point computations. The most cost-effective way to accelerate floating-point performance in general-purpose processors is to use the SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) parallel computation model. Therefore, a key SSE component is the SIMD-FP (floating-point) extensions. The processor attains high SIMD performance by balancing execution with increased memory bandwidth. Several of the targeted multimedia applications have large working sets and are streaming applications—that is, applications in which data are usually read once and then discarded. For such applications, the Pentium III’s instruction set architecture provides the programmer with primitives to manage data caching and minimize cache pollution. The cache control instructions enable the software to better tolerate increasing memory latencies. In addition to increased floating-point performance for 3D and speech recognition applications, we added new-media instructions to accelerate video encoding/decoding and 3D-software rendering.