It came to my attention the other night that Intel will be rolling out an SSE4 set of instructions. Here is the Wikipedia treatment including the new instruction mnemonics. You sort of have to be skilled in the art of SIMD programming to begin to intuitively make sense of nonsense like PSIGNW, PSHUFB, and PMADDUBSW.

This got me wondering, though: Did we ever have occasion to apply the SSE3 instruction set for general multimedia programming? All I remember from that set is that it had instructions to do add/subtract operations in parallel which apparently has application toward fractal programming which, in turn, has application in… making pretty fractal artwork, from what I hear.

Will there be any practical A/V codec use for the new SSE4 instructions?

Update: Guillaume Poirer had trouble with the anti-spam measures in the comment section (reminding me to get that software properly upgraded). Here is what he had to say:

SSE4 will surely be interesting as these instructions are to deal with integers, which are extensively used in video encoding. This is what Loren Merritt has to say about SSE4.

What I don’t understand though is why there’s no documentation about SSE4 (or whatever the official name is) on Intel’s website (but maybe it’s because I haven’t been lucky).

About SSE3, these instructions were mostly usefull for float/complex operations, which aren’t usefull for video encoding, though maybe they can be usefull for audio encoding, I don’t know.