If you programmed PCs in the late 90s, you probably remember the 'Intel Inside Pentium with MMX' stickers. MMX was, of course, a big marketing buzzword, but it was also Intel's major attempt at bringing SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions to mainstream desktop CPUs. It's a rite of passage of every student that completes our software rendering module to start asking questions and exploring the topic of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data). Today we have AVX-512 , NEON , SVE , and GPUs with thousands of cores. These modern CPUs & extensions are the result of years of exploration, learning, market pressure, and they all bring with them a lot of history/retro-compatibility noise. As always, I like to look back and discuss different technologies by analyzing what was happening when they were just starting out. Back in the late 90s, many programmers were learning how to squeeze a few extra frames per second out of a Pentium MMX using hand-writing assembly for the first time.…