Instruction Sets

What is an instruction set of Intel and AMD Processor ?

An instruction set is a collection of instructions that a computer processor can execute. Both Intel and AMD processors are based on the x86 architecture, which means they support the same basic instruction set. However, each company has developed its own extensions to the x86 instruction set, which are not always compatible with each other.

Intel's instruction set extensions are called SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions), which were introduced with the Pentium III processor. Since then, Intel has introduced a number of additional instruction set extensions, including SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), AVX2, and AVX-512.

AMD's instruction set extensions are called 3DNow!, which were introduced with the K6-2 processor. AMD has since introduced additional instruction set extensions, including 3DNow! Professional, 3DNow! Extensions, and AMD64 (also known as x86-64 or AMD x86-64).

These instruction set extensions are designed to improve the performance of certain types of applications, such as multimedia processing or cryptography, by allowing them to perform more operations in parallel or with less overhead. However, software must be specifically designed to take advantage of these instruction set extensions in order to see any benefit.