X-Bit LAbs have a nice article up dealing with the newest form of SSE to be seen in Intels Prescott CPU. Here's the link. Enjoy!
"If Intel didn’t introduce new instructions in Prescott, we should certainly prefer Athlon 64, which seems to have no drastic weaknesses. And with the today’s state of things, we cannot be sure any more.
Intel offers optimized program libraries and the new instructions to software developers, which are certainly going to be used to the utmost effect. AMD also went this way and announced its libraries fully utilizing x86-64 capabilities.
There is one more circumstance. There have been rumors about Intel going to implement the AMD x86-64 architecture in its Prescott CPUs if this architecture becomes a success. Seems like a sci-fi thing: we haven’t seen anything like that! On the other hand, as AMD is already delaying the launch of Athlon 64, it might include into its new CPU the new Prescott instructions. Then all Prescott-optimized libraries would work well on AMD CPUs. Prescott will no longer have any advantages due to more convenient instructions. Especially, since there should be no big problems with it: AMD CPUs have been long executing flexible 3DNow! operations. In fact, I would expect AMD to introduce these “horizontal” operations with the data due to more suitable processor core architecture, lover frequencies, bigger number of execution units, etc.
We hope AMD will do it as fast as possible, because it will willy-nilly have to implement SSE developments into its processors, as it has always done."
Posted by ParaKnowYa at March 28, 2003 01:39 AM