Differences Vs X86
However VIS is not an instruction toolkit like Intel's MMX and SSE. MMX has only 8 registers shared with the FPU stack, while SPARC processors have 32 registers, also aliased to the double-precision (64-bit) floating pointer registers.
As with the SIMD instruction set extensions on RISC processors, VIS strictly conform to the main principle of RISC: keep the instruction set concise and efficient.
This design is very different from comparable extensions on CISC processors, such as MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, 3DNow!.
Sometimes programmers must use several VIS instructions to accomplish an operation that can be done with only one MMX or SSE instruction, but it should be kept in mind that fewer instructions doesn't automatically result in better performance.
Read more about this topic: Visual Instruction Set
Famous quotes containing the word differences:
“The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)