>
> > The Pentium III, also known under the code name 'Katmai', does not come with
> > a feature that would show an immediate performance increase as in case of
> > the K6-3. Its basic core as well as the L2-cache architecture is identical
> > to the Pentium II processor. The justification for the new name lies in a
> > set of 70 new multimedia instructions, once known as 'KNI', now known as
> > 'SSE' standing for 'streaming SIMD extensions'. Those new instructions
> > enable the CPU to perform floating-point calculations on multiple data at
> > the same time, which proves very helpful for 3D graphics, video encoding and
> > decoding and other floating point intensive applications that operate on
> > large sets of data.
> >
> > Can this be helpfull for searching Mersenne primes???
>
> Only if KNI allows double precision floating point (which it almost
> surely won't, since multimedia doesn't need 15-digit precision).
> Now, if KNI has very fast 32-bit to 64-bit unsigned integer multiplies it
> does open up the chance of a pretty fast number-theoretic DWT squaring,
> but I wouldn't hold my breath that it has that, either.
It can multiply four simulatenous 32-bit numbers in 2 clock cycles. It uses
128-data (instead of overlaying 64-bit data on the floating point unit as the MMX
does). I believe that these instructions can be useful with a creative approach
to number theory problems. Look at this.
http://www.tbcnet.com/~clive/knirough.html
Chip Kerchner
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