Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions

Because floating-point computation is the heart of 3D geometry, speeding up floating-point computation is vital to overall 3D performance. To produce a visually perceptible difference in graphics applications, Intel's 32-bit processors-based on the IA-32 architecture-required an increase of 1.5 to 2 times the native floating-point performance. One path to better performance involves studying how the system uses data. Today's 3D applications can execute a lot faster by differentiating between data used repeatedly and streaming data-data used only once and then discarded. The Pentium III's new floating-point extension lets programmers designate data as streaming and provides instructions that handle this data efficiently. The authors designed the Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions (ISSE) to enable a new level of visual computing on the volume PC platform. They discuss their results in terms of boosting the performance of 3D and video applications.