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The Mobile AMD Athlon XP-M Processor
March 2003
3) Software optimized exclusively for other x86 industry processor
architectures supporting SSE use the non-optimized code path on AMD
processor architectures.
With the advent of 3DNow! Professional technology, the mobile AMD Athlon XP-M
processor can seamlessly allow SIMD-optimized software in the third scenario above to
recognize SSE support and run the optimized code path for increased performance. The
recognition of SSE support in 3DNow! Professional technology is performed
automatically by PC software applications that use industry standard feature flags,
provided in the CPUID instruction to automatically recognize SSE support and run the
optimized code path. This means that with 3DNow! Professional technology’s support for
both 3DNow! and SSE technologies, the mobile AMD Athlon XP-M processor is able to
take advantage of the performance gains offered by SIMD-optimized software
applications.
Not only is the mobile AMD Athlon XP-M processor designed to benefit from
existing software applications supporting 3DNow! and SSE technologies, but in the
future, software developers are planned to have the ability to utilize the strength of
both 3DNow! and SSE technology when optimizing code paths for AMD processor
architectures that support 3DNow! Professional technology. The mobile
AMD Athlon XP-M processor enables this advanced level of SIMD optimization by
allowing 3DNow! and SSE instructions to be executed in the same code path.
QuantiSpeed Architecture: Hardware Data Prefetch
To further enhance processor IPC and, therefore, processor performance, the
mobile AMD Athlon XP-M processor also uses hardware data prefetch technology.
This hardware data prefetch technology observes memory accesses, looks for regular
access patterns, and speculatively fetches the cache line with the data into the
processor’s L2 data cache in advance of the actual data access, therefore reducing
the average latency seen by the processor in accessing memory. In the past, data
prefetch was supported through the instructions introduced in 3DNow! and SSE
technologies. However, for the processor to take advantage of this capability,
software applications had to be specifically optimized with the 3DNow! and SSE
instructions. The mobile AMD Athlon XP-M processor is designed to automatically
optimize performance on existing software that had not previously been optimized
using the hardware data prefetch instructions supported by 3DNow! Professional
technology.