X-bit labs

Second Iteration of Core Micro-Architecture: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU Review (page 5)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 10/28/2007 | 09:04 PM ]

SSE4

Penryn processors, such as Yorkfield, may also boast newly expanded SIMD commands list. The new generation of Intel processors acquired support of SSE4.1 set that includes 47 new instructions. Nevertheless, despite a pretty large number of new instructions, they do not form a logical set, but are rather numerous additions to the already existing SIMD command sets. New instructions should as always help improve the new processors performance when working with 3D graphics, streaming video and in a number of scientific computational applications.

However, we will be able to really feel the positive effect from the new SSE4 instructions support only after a while, when it becomes widely adopted in computer software. So far, there are only two applications that use the new SSE4 instructions. They are two video codecs: DivX 6.7 and TMPEG Xpress 4.4.

As for the main peculiarities of the new SSE4 instructions, they include vectored 32-bit integer multiply operations; 8-bit unsigned min/max operations, plus 16-bit and 32-bit signed and unsigned versions; features to improve the compiler’s ability to vectorize integer and single-precision code more efficiently, as well as video encode acceleration functions; floating-point dot product operation and streaming load instructions using the peculiarities of the processor cache-memory structure.