SSE and Real-world apps

Streaming SIMD Extensions

The biggest change in the move to the Pentium III was the introduction of Streaming SIMD Extensions, or SSE for short. The "Pentium III" in "Pentium III Xeon" brings this enterprise solution up to pace by incorporating SSE. This, and the higher clock speeds attainable by the P3 OLGA packaging account for most of the changes between the PII and PIII versions of the Xeon.

What is SSE and how will it benefit the Xeon?

In short, SSE allows for a single instruction to execute on four pairs of floating point values simultaneously. The ability to calculate 4 floating point values in one clock cycle can't be used by every program, but can be greatly beneficial to some. 3D transformation routines make specific use of matrix math, which exemplifies and the ability to calculate a result in one clock can speed up the process tremendously. makes SSE a boon for 3D game developers, one of the big targets of Intel's SSE development effort.

However, the Xeon isn't marketed as a consumer processor, making its gametime limited at best. You may have noticed that Intel isn't exclusively targeting gaming with SSE - even the name "Streaming SIMD Extensions" is blandly technical in its description. Floating point math is widely used in today's scientific and multimedia applications, such as 3d modeling, mechanical CAD, electronic design automation, finite element analysis, and financial modeling.

ATI is releasing a real-time MPEG-2 encoder with their All-In-Wonder 128 graphics card, which specifically takes advantage of SSE to attain IPB in real-time. Adobe has just released a patch to Photoshop 5.0.2 which takes advantage of SSE on many of their core filters, such as Wind and Lighting Effects. Of course, 3D transformation operations are a big part of CG rendering and modeling, and 3D artists are bound to benefit from the integration of SSE. The following is a partial list of general and development applications which are SSE-enabled for the Pentium III and Xeon.

SSE enabled applications
E-business	Inter-merchant, docSpace Enterprise, Commerce One
Asset Management	BackWeb Sales Accelerator, Internet Commsuite, Gauntlet Active Firewall
Office Applications	IBM ViaVoice, MS Office 2000, Lotus Smartsuite Millenium Edition
Video/Publishing	Macromedia Director Shockwave
Graphics	Adobe Photoshop 5 (PIII plug-in), PhotoDeluxe, MS Photodraw 2000, Ulead Photo Express