The Evolution of x86 SIMD: From SSE to AVX-512
Hacker News
February 17, 2026
AI-Generated Deep Dive Summary
The evolution of x86 SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) technology—from its early days with MMX to the advanced AVX-512 instructions—is a story of innovation, compromise, and competition. Rooted in the 1990s, this journey reveals how Intel and AMD battled for dominance in vector processing, shaping modern computing architectures through strategic decisions, technical trade-offs, and marketing battles.
In 1993, Intel made a bold move by allowing its Israel Development Center to lead the development of the Pentium MMX, marking a significant shift in their engineering approach. Uri Weiser, head of the Architecture group in Haifa, spearheaded this project, which introduced eight new MMX registers aliased to existing x87 floating-point registers. This decision streamlined hardware but created compatibility challenges, as mixing MMX and x87 instructions could lead to register corruption
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Originally published on Hacker News on 2/17/2026