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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Scumbria who wrote (98677)3/16/2000 6:05:00 AM
From: ptanner  Read Replies (2) of 1570644
 
Scumbria -- you got this response over at JC's re: AMD & SSE

jc-news.com

On SI, Scumbria (who is no Intel-fanatic) is saying that AMD has to implement SSE now, because the X-Box will mean that programmers are going to SSE-optimize all their games. It may be true, and I think I agree that they have to implement SSE. It would be good in terms of using the Intel compilers for SPEC scores, too. So I am wondering what the issues are:

Patents: Scumbria thinks there will be patent obstacles. I wonder whether SSE is really that innovative. As far as I recall the issue around MMX was mainly the use of the Trademark MMX, which seems like a minor issue.

Time: AMD had time to put the SSE prefetch instructions into Athlon, so they have had the opcode details for quite some time. Seems like SSE could be one of the enhancements in Mustang and Sledgehammer, if AMD wanted it to be. Of course the Xbox debacle only just happened, and they may not have seen the need up until then (though there was always the question of SPEC and the Intel compilers).

Opcodes: Scumbria thinks there are clashes, but I checked, and all 3DNow! instructions start with either
0f 0f (SIMD)
0f 0e (FEMMS, fast enter/exit of MMX/fp state)
or
0f 0d (Prefetch)
which are all free at least up until P-III (SSE). No telling what will happen with SSE2 of course.

AMD have been quite willing to add Intel stuff to Athlon. They put in the 64Gbyte memory extensions, the SSE prefetch, etc. So is SSE for AMD the future?
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