Intel's new SSE4 instruction set will appear in Penryn processors and beyond

Many applications process vast amounts of data, and need to perform well in these situations. Intel has delivered many extensions to its famous x86 instruction set, such as MMX, SSE and SSE2. Although I don't code directly with the assembly language much anymore, I'm still happy to use class libraries and frameworks that are optimized for multimedia, high-speed calculations, etc.

With the forth-coming 45 nanometer (nm) processors (codenamed Penryn), Intel is announcing SSE4, a new collection of over 50 new machine language instructions to help multimedia data processing applications, and even compilers. There's a Intel white paper available that details these new instructions.

What's interesting in many of these new instructions is that they are quite high level, compared to many primitive x86 instructions such as MOV, ADD, and so on. Although the Intel architecture is one of the most widely-used CISC architectures, still proposition still holds.

However, with SSE4, we developers get our hands on instructions that help us calculate CRC32, manipulate strings, count the number of enabled/set bits in a value, round floating point values, and find min/max values even with a single instruction. Wow, I must say!

I can imagine how much these additions could make applications more performant. Can't wait to have the .NET runtime to support these new instructions in the IL-to-x86 JIT compiler.