Intel's New SSE4 Instructions for Upcoming CPUs

The future 45 nm Intel CPUs that will be released in the second half of 2007 are said to receive a new set of 50 SSE4 instructions, which are supposed to boost up performance for multimedia and web applications.

Intel revealed at IDF Fall 2006 that it will extend the 64bit instruction set with more than 50 new SSE4 instructions, in order "to better take advantage of Intel's next-generation 45 nm silicon manufacturing process and expand the performance and capabilities of Intel Architecture."

Presumably codenamed Wolfdal, Penryn, Yorkfield/Bloomfield, the future 45 nm CPUs will benefit and accelerate the development of various 64bit applications, including graphics-oriented ones, video encoding and processing, 3D imaging, HD gaming and web server software. These new CPUs are still based on the Core 2 micro-architecture, but will be able to incorporate more than 4 cores.

Earlier information presented Wolfdale and Penryn CPUs to be released as soon as 2008, but Intel rescheduled them for 2007, taking into consideration recent progress with 65 nm product shipment and outstanding progress with 45 nm development.

AMD usually licenses Intel's "streaming SIMD extensions" (SSE) instructions sets in order to include them in its own CPUs. For now, it is unclear whether AMD will decide to include the new SSE4 set into upcoming proprietary CPUs that are to appear in 2007 or not.

Software makers haven't yet announced any SSE4 support for their future products, but Intel will contact industry-leading companies and insure SSE4 support from at least several of these by mid-2007.