Applications Tuning for Streaming SIMD Extensions

In early 1997, Intel formed an engineering lab whose charter was to apply a new set of instructions to the optimization of software applications. This lab worked with commercial software companies to increase the performance of their applications by using these new instructions. Two years later, this new instruction set has been made public as a principal new feature of the Pentium III processor, the Streaming SIMD Extensions. Many of the commercial software companies' applications on which the lab consulted have been brought to market, demonstrating significant performance improvements by using the Streaming SIMD Extensions. This paper describes many of the principles and concepts developed as a result of that activity.