A New SSE Instruction Set: AMD Announces SSE5

So what's so important about being able to use 3+ operands? In a word: MADD, Multiply-ADDition operations (aka multiply-accumulate/MAC), such as C=(A*B)+C. Matrix math is the cornerstone of data processing and image rendering, and one of the cornerstone operations in manipulating a matrix is multiplying two elements and adding them to a third, which would require 3 operands. Modern GPUs are MADD powerhouses, with their stream processors capable of processing a mind-boggling number of such instructions in a short period of time; being fast at MADD is one of the specialized tasks that makes a GPU so fast at its job.

Meanwhile x86 processors have no real MADD abilities, so any time a CPU is doing the kind of image manipulation work that would benefit from MADD, instead it is executing separate multiply and addition instructions (and sometimes more). It should come as no surprise that AMD's favorite/most-publicized part of SSE5 then are instructions using 3+ operands since fusing two instructions in to one can theoretically double performance in certain situations. Furthermore using such instructions can cut down on the number of register load/store operations needed, which can save yet more time.

AMD has provided us with an example of such a situation, with the code for a 4x4 matrix multiplication operation, one coded optimally in SSE3, the other optimized via SSE5. The SSE3 code requires 34 instructions, meanwhile the SSE5 code does it in 20. Now there is more to the performance of such a code segment than the number of instructions (so this example isn't necessarily 41% faster) since the time to execute and retire an instruction can vary depending on the instruction, but it doesn't negate the performance improvement offered by such code.

For actual performance numbers with SSE5, AMD has told us that they've found that a discrete cosine transform - an operation important for image and movie encoding - can be done 30% faster using SSE5 than SSE3. They have even more impressive numbers for encryption processing, with a 5x performance improvement possible on certain encryption tasks, although we suspect this case is more limited than their image encoding scenario. Either way the promise of other performance improvements is there, however this is going to heavily depend on how well programmers will be able to extract additional performance out of SSE5, and how good AMD's own optimized math libraries will be once those are released.

This also isn't taking in to significant account instructions that are not part of the MADD/MAC set. All of AMD's examples today deal with improvements due to those instructions, meanwhile we don't have a lot of information on the performance aspects of the permutation, vector, or precision instructions. We have no doubt that they'll be similarly useful, we just don't know to what degree at this point.

Finally, as we're always watching how the predicted merging of CPUs and GPUs is progressing, this is a notable time. Although AMD is not targeting GPUs specifically with SSE5, as we mentioned before GPUs are particularly fast at MADD operations and meanwhile SSE5 is providing CPUs a shot in the arm in that area. This won't kill (or even significantly maim) the GPU, but it is one less thing that the GPU advantage is shrinking in. As SSE iterations keep coming out and implementing features similar to DSPs and GPUs, they will keep chipping away at their side of the barrier between the CPU and the GPU until very little is left and the two become one.