Inside Intel's Penryn
Published: 12 Nov 2007
SSE4
Other apparently major improvements are so specialised that they're only of interest to a particular segment of the market. Penryn has 47 new multimedia instructions as part of its SSE4 extensions; these are designed to treat large arrays of data in a single go, and bring many new ways to compare, shuffle, compute, merge and store the sort of information found in video and imaging applications.
Penryn's 47 new SSE4 instructions will mostly benefit video and imaging applications.
In particular, Intel says, this brings big benefits for video compression, where the chip is exceptionally good at analysing streams for motion estimation. This extracts features from the stream and tracks the way they move from frame to frame, and is a very significant factor in making low-bandwidth, low-latency, high-quality video. The additions in Penryn will have the most impact on high definition video; outside that area, though, they will have few applications.
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