Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Do MMX and SSE have different instruction sets? If so, is SSE preferred over MMX?
yes they have different instruction sets: MMX can only handle integer values, while SSE can only handle floating point values. (only SSE2 added floating point support)
SSE2 is generally preferred over MMX since you can handle even more data with single instructions (and/or other types)
otoh, what do we want to prove with this? i remember well that i had to remove the automatic use of SSE2 instructions in Gem because upset users (the most prominent of them being you) demanded it, since not all hardware supported it at that time. virtually each and every x86 based machine has support for MMX though. there are still many machines around that do not have SSE2 support.
fgmadsr. IOhannes