Streaming SIMD Extensions

In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is an SIMD instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series processors as a reply to AMD's 3DNow! (which had debuted a year earlier). SSE contains 70 new instructions, most of which work on single precision floating point data. SIMD instructions can greatly increase performance when exactly the same operations are to be performed on multiple data objects. Typical applications are digital signal processing and graphics processing.

Intel's first IA-32 SIMD effort was the MMX instruction set. MMX had two main problems: it re-used existing floating point registers making the CPU unable to work on both floating point and SIMD data at the same time, and it only worked on integers. SSE floating point instructions operate on a new independent register set (the XMM registers), and it adds a few integer instructions that work on MMX registers.

SSE was subsequently expanded by Intel to SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, and SSE4. Because it supports floating point math, it had a wider application than MMX and became more popular. The addition of integer support in SSE2 made MMX largely redundant, though further performance increases can be attained in some situations by using MMX in parallel with SSE operations.

SSE was originally known as KNI for Katmai New Instructions (Katmai being the code name for the first Pentium III core revision). During the Katmai project Intel sought to distinguish it from their earlier product line, particularly their flagship Pentium II. It was later renamed ISSE, for Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions, then SSE. AMD eventually added support for SSE instructions, starting with its Athlon XP and Duron (Morgan core) processors.