A5 - SIMD

image: T Latham, lecture slides

• single instruction can be issued to operate on multiple elements of an array or vector

• it does not always mean multiple parallel cores

• for modern processors, ensuring efficient vectorisation is essential for optimising code

• Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSEs) allow a single instruction to be issues, that operates on all data in small vector registers

• Advanced Vector Extensions (AVEs) and its successors and later equivalents extend the size of these registers