A review of SIMD multimedia extensions and their usage in scientific and engineering applications

The volume and complexity of data processed by today's personal computers are increasing exponentially, placing incredible demands on the microprocessors. In the meantime, computing performance that can be achieved by increasing the clock speed of a microprocessor is reaching to physical limits thus making the architectural solutions more prominent. Due to this an important architectural feature is added to recent microprocessors, single instruction multiple data (SIMD), which is a set of instructions that can speed up an application performance by allowing basic operation to be performed on multiple data elements in parallel with fewer instructions. The SIMD computational technique was introduced in the IA-32 Intel® architecture with MMX technology and then further enhanced with Intel's introduction of streaming SIMD extensions (SSE), SSE 2 (SSE2) and SSE 3 (SSE3). Although programming using these SIMD extensions enables software to achieve higher performance, several exiting scientific applications are not affected. This paper gives an overview of SIMD multimedia extensions. The features of these extensions are introduced. Available methods for programming with multimedia instruction sets are discussed. It also reviews recent trends to use multimedia extensions to accelerate many applications such as multimedia, scientific and engineering applications, and argues for further use in other significant computationally intensive applications.