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The past year hasn't been too good for AMD. Their new releases are lackluster, to the point that they won't even send out their latest releases to regular reviewers. Their ATI branch is suffering similar troubles with their X2-series of cards, which haven't been able to out-perform NVIDIAs biggest models. So, if you were AMD, what would you do to really aggravate the competition? Release a new instruction set with their naming scheme, of course.
Yes, Intel first released SSE back in the Pentium 3 days, followed by SSE2 with the Pentium 4 and SSE3 in late 2005. SSE4 is on it's way with Penryn/Nehalem, so to see an SSE5 instruction set on the horizon that has virtually nothing to do with Intel is beyond odd. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if SSE5 was built on top of SSE4, but it's not. It uses portions of SSE4 which seems to become SSE4A, as seen in this forum thread. In fact, SSE5 could have been named 3DNow!2 and it would have made much more sense.
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But, I am putting too much emphasis on that. The fact is, SSE5 will bring some interesting things to the table. According to documentation, SSE5 would thrive off of a GPU, which is where AMD's own Fusion technology would be of benefit. The set also adds over one hundred new instructions, which you can see laid out in this comprehensive PDF. Now the question to ask is, what will Intel be naming their next instruction set?
Source: Ars Technica
Yes, Intel first released SSE back in the Pentium 3 days, followed by SSE2 with the Pentium 4 and SSE3 in late 2005. SSE4 is on it's way with Penryn/Nehalem, so to see an SSE5 instruction set on the horizon that has virtually nothing to do with Intel is beyond odd. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if SSE5 was built on top of SSE4, but it's not. It uses portions of SSE4 which seems to become SSE4A, as seen in this forum thread. In fact, SSE5 could have been named 3DNow!2 and it would have made much more sense.
<table align="center"><tbody><tr><td>
But, I am putting too much emphasis on that. The fact is, SSE5 will bring some interesting things to the table. According to documentation, SSE5 would thrive off of a GPU, which is where AMD's own Fusion technology would be of benefit. The set also adds over one hundred new instructions, which you can see laid out in this comprehensive PDF. Now the question to ask is, what will Intel be naming their next instruction set?
Source: Ars Technica