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.…