For its line of x86 microprocessors, AMD created a set of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instructions called 3DNow! It was released in 1998 as an upgrade to Intel’s MMX instruction set, which was created and released in 1997.
Applications that involve multimedia and graphics processing, in particular, can benefit greatly from SIMD instructions because they enable a processor to carry out the same operation on multiple pieces of data simultaneously.
In order to speed up a variety of applications, such as video and audio encoding and decoding, image and video processing, and 3D graphics rendering, 3DNow! includes instructions for floating-point operations, integer operations, and data transfer operations.
In order to provide a high-performance computing platform for a variety of applications, 3DNow! was created to be used in conjunction with other processor technologies, such as the FPU (floating-point unit) and SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). Up until the 2001 release of the SSE2 instruction set, which replaced 3DNow! and replaced it as the industry standard for SIMD instructions on x86 processors, it was widely used in AMD processors.
However, some contemporary AMD processors continue to support 3DNow! instructions, and some programs that were created especially to benefit from the special features of 3DNow! still make use of them.
