Development of the x86 SIMD Instruction Set

Intel launched the first SIMD instruction set MMX in 1997. MMX uses 64-bit vector registers MM0 to MM7. However, these vector registers are not dedicated. They are parts of 80-bit floating-point registers ST0 to ST7.

In 1999, Intel launched the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instruction set. SSE uses independent vector registers instead of floating-point registers. In addition, the length of vector registers is increased to 128 bits. AMD developed SSE in 2001. Since then, SIMD instructions in the x86 architecture have been growing, and SIMD instruction sets such as SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, AVX, and AVX-512 have been developed.