SSE3 Instructions

[JBird7986]

Just wondering what they actually do? Are they important or not? Should the fact that I don't have this instruction set bother me?

 

[bjc112]

If it's something you don't know about, its typically something you don't need.. However with Venice and Sandiego, your going to get it reguardless..

Thsoe are the only two cores you should really be looking at, and they come with it! So don't worry about it..



😛

 

[JBird7986]

Except I'm not buying now...got myself a 939 Newcastle about six months ago...I was just wondering if my not having it is going to cause me headaches/problems.

 

[Chocolate Pi]

Nah, it won't by any means.

 

[Jeff7181]

Prescotts have had SSE3 insturctions for some time now and there are still very few apps actually designed to take advantage of it. I can't tell you what the instructions actually do... I've read about it... don't fully understand what benefit it has or exactly how it speeds things up. I guess it benefits certain types of applications more than others, and I think those types of applications aren't very widely used.

*EDIT* I found this...

# An instruction to speed up x87 floating point to integer conversion
# Five instructions to improve the efficiency of loading, moving and duplicating SIMD data, useful in complex arithmetic algorithms
# An instruction to avoid cache line splits when loading data, useful in certain video compression applications
# Four instructions to enable more efficient handling of arrays of structures. This is useful in 3D graphics, particularly when processing vertex buffers.
# Two instructions that help manage thread synchronization, which will in turn improve Hyper-Threading performance.

That last one obviously doesn't apply to AMD processors... which is why I believe AMD's SSE3 implementation only includes 11 new instructions.

 

[CQuinn]

Couldn't the last instruction be applied as well to dual-core processors?