AMD 3DNow! Technology Overview and Intrinsics

Microsoft Specific

The AMD 3DNow! technology is a group of instructions that opens the traditional processing bottlenecks for multimedia and floating-point-intensive applications. The 3DNow! technology enables faster frame rates on high-resolution scenes, much better physical modeling of real-world environments, sharper and more detailed 3D imaging, smoother video playback, and near-theater–quality audio.

The 3DNow! technology is compatible with today's existing x86 software and requires no operating system support, allowing 3DNow! applications to work with all existing operating systems. This technology is implemented by processors from AMD beginning with AMD-K6-2, AMD-K6-III, and AMD Athlon processors.

Beginning with the AMD Athlon processor, 3DNow! technology has been enhanced to add five new 3DNow! digital signal processing (DSP) instructions and 19 MMX Extensions, including streaming functionality.

This overview of AMD 3DNow! technology contains the following sections:

• Key Functionality

• Feature Detection

• Register Set

• Data Types

• 3DNow! Instruction Formats

• Intrinsics Overview

• Task Switching

• Exceptions

• Prefixes

• 3DNow! Intrinsics

See Also

Concepts

MMX, SSE, and SSE2 Intrinsics