Intel Pentium III E "Coppermine" (Slot-1)

When Intel’s Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) were first introduced at the beginning of this year with the Pentium III, they were a joke. AMD’s 3DNow! instructions had been around for a longer period of time and they already had more support than Intel’s SSE. The world was screaming MMX2 at the top of their lungs and the performance "benefits" of SSE could not be seen outside of Intel’s SSE-optimized benchmarks.

Now, eight months later, SSE’s presence isn’t tremendous in the industry but it is definitely noticeable. There are examples of SSE enhanced applications that do experience a performance gain from the instructions, but at the same time there are examples that don’t. Intel’s own Naturally Speaking benchmark offers a noticeable performance increase when using SSE and it is a real world performance benchmark. However, the SSE (and 3DNow! for that matter) optimizations in the current test of Quake 3 Arena don’t provide for a noticeable performance improvement.

On the driver side of things, video card manufacturers are finally taking advantage of the SSE instructions offered by Intel to boost performance. Case in point would be Matrox’s TurboGL drivers that take advantage of either SSE or 3DNow! in order to boost performance in a handful of OpenGL games.

Intel has been working on making SSE even easier for developers toimplement. They currently have two compilers in beta, a Fortran and a C++ compiler, that should become available in the first half of next year that are SSE optimized. These compilers will automatically generate SSE enhanced code where appropriate. So when a programmer goes to write a function that could be aided by the use of SSE at compile time, the compiler generates a single binary with SSE and non-SSE code. The generation is done in such a way that the overall size of the binary is not increased too greatly and there should be no compatibility problems with non-SSE processors.

This method of implementing SSE is a definite step forward for Intel; it is the only way to get SSE into the hands of the users without asking for too much from the developers. In terms of integration, the compilers essentially plug into the Microsoft Development Environment so the developers don’t even have to migrate from the environment they are used to. The compilers will be a part of Intel’s VTUNE package and should be in final release form sometime in the first half of 2000. The package will retail for around $500.