AMD's Screaming Sindy gets to be five years old

AMD SAID it's put together a further extension to the X86 instruction set - yes, it's SSE5 - or Screaming Sindy, as we used to call this at the other plaice.

What's it got? It's got three-operand instructions. What's that? AMD said it increases the number of operands an X86 instruction can handle from two to three.

What does that mean? It means that new instructions such as Fused Multiply Accumulate can do all sorts of complicated things using only one instruction. That's going to mean better execution for graphics, photo rendering, audio, vector maths and the rest.

SSE5 will start appearing on the Bulldozer core, coming in 2009. Will Intel use it or have its own version? Well it said it would never do X86-64, and then reversed its view.

Will Sindy (5) throw La Intella's toys out of the pram? We'll have to wait a few years to find out. µ

L'INQ
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