> The Pentium III, also known under the code name 'Katmai', does not come with
> a feature that would show an immediate performance increase as in case of
> the K6-3. Its basic core as well as the L2-cache architecture is identical
> to the Pentium II processor. The justification for the new name lies in a
> set of 70 new multimedia instructions, once known as 'KNI', now known as
> 'SSE' standing for 'streaming SIMD extensions'. Those new instructions
> enable the CPU to perform floating-point calculations on multiple data at
> the same time, which proves very helpful for 3D graphics, video encoding and
> decoding and other floating point intensive applications that operate on
> large sets of data.
>
> Can this be helpfull for searching Mersenne primes???
probably not. While I haven't actually seen the tech ref on the KNI
instructions they are likely to be single precision vector/matrix operations
oriented towards 3D, probably operating on two 'singles' at a time.. The LL
test would benefit most from operations that used larger word sizes, perhaps a
SIMD 64 bit integer multiply-accumulate.
-jrp
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