Extensions to basic ISA

• Multimedia/Graphics extensions

  • MMX (Intel) for some SIMD (single-instruction-multiple-data, i.e., vector-like) instructions using f-p registers and “slicing” them in 8-bit units
  • Sun SPARC Visual Instruction Set for on-chip graphics functional units
  • Full-fledge Multimedia processors (e.g., Equator Map 1000 with hundreds of SIMD instructions)

• Vector processors

  • The “old” Cray-like supercomputers
  • Might make a come-back for stream processing

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