AMD 3DNow! instructions finally extinct as LLVM compiler drops support
Jul. 18, 2024
AMD’s near-ancient 3DNow! instructions have faded even further into obscurity. Open-source compiler LLVM is finally removing support for the set of instructions that hasn’t been supported by AMD’s CPUs since 2011.
The 3DNow! instruction set was introduced in 1998 as a competitor to Intel’s MMX. It added Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) instructions to AMD’s base x86 instruction set, which helped the CPUs do vector processing of floating-point operations using vector registers.