langreiter.com plain, simple: SIMD

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SIMD

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY azverkan 8370 days AGO

Single Instruction (Stream), Multiple Data (Stream)

In contrast to [create SISD], [create MIMD].

SIMD units exploit a property of data streams called data parallelism (i.e. a large number of data elements needs the same instruction to be performed on it). Data streams that exhibit a large degree of data parallelism are for example signals (e.g. audio, video), tick data or genome data.

Nowadays SIMD units are usually integrated into SISD host systems (as is the case with the MMX/[create MMX2]/SSE [[create Pentium]], AltiVec [[create PowerPC]], 3DNow! [Athlon] technologies &c). Attempts to build pure SIMD systems have proven rather futile.