In 1997, Intel introduced their MMX feature with the Pentium II microprocessor. This is a trade name for Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) capability. The MMX special instruction set was primarily aimed at the emerging complex multimedia features. 3D graphics processing stormed the second half of the previous decade and Intel thought it was nice to implement some 3D processing instructions in its CPUs.
AMD countered the Intel Pentium II MMX with their 3Dnow! SIMD design which was implemented in their AMD K6 CPU’s. This expanded the SIMD concept with floating point calculations that extended the range of numbers that can be crunched. Intel couldn’t agree with the AMD supremacy and introduced SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) in its Pentium III CPUs, further improving on the MMX design. This set of instructions included registers expanding to 128-bit. In order to take full advantage of these special instructions, programmers had to write and organize their pieces of software code in a very strict format to fit into the SIMD registers. Even with all these restrictions, SIMD freed the PC as a graphics processing powerhouse that unseated the specialized graphics silicon from companies like Silicon Graphics.
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