Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 - Manual (Page 34)

IA-32 Intel® Architecture Optimization
1-6
SSE instructions are useful for 3D geometry, 3D rendering, speech
recognition, and video encoding and decoding.
Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
Streaming SIMD extensions 2 add the following:
• 128-bit data type with two packed double-precision floating-point
operands
• 128-bit data types for SIMD integer operation on 16-byte, 8-word,
4-doubleword, or 2-quadword integers
• support for SIMD arithmetic on 64-bit integer operands
• instructions for converting between new and existing data types
• extended support for data shuffling
• extended support for cacheability and memory ordering operations
SSE2 instructions are useful for 3D graphics, video decoding/encoding,
and encryption.
Streaming SIMD Extensions 3
Streaming SIMD extensions 3 add the following:
• SIMD floating-point instructions for asymmetric and horizontal
computation
• a special-purpose 128-bit load instruction to avoid cache line splits
• an x87 FPU instruction to convert to integer independent of the
floating-point control word (FCW)
• instructions to support thread synchronization
SSE3 instructions are useful for scientific, video and multi-threaded
applications.