In fact, the instruction set AMD’s 3DNow had been virtually extinct for some time, but the announcement by the LLVM Compiler who was the only one still accepting his instructions, he just finished taking him to the grave. Yes, AMD 3DNow has reached the end of its life and can no longer be used further away.
This was definitely something that had to happen sooner or later. Although AMD promoted 3DNow technology with great fanfare when it first launched with the AMD K6-2 processors in February 1998, AMD itself actually abandoned it and discontinued it in 2011, with the Bulldozer and Llano APUs already without this instruction set.
The final farewell to AMD 3DNow!
The AMD 3DNow! instruction set was introduced, as we said, in 1998 and was the red company’s answer to Intel’s MMX processors. It added SIMD (single instruction multiple data) instructions to the company’s basic x86 instruction set, which greatly helped the processor perform vector processing of floating-point operations, which was especially useful for games and 3D applications… that’s its name.
The truth is that 3DNow worked for several years, but 13 years after its initial launch, AMD replaced it with the new SSE equivalents in 2011 and stopped including this instruction set in its processors, starting with the Bulldozer K10. However, 13 years of processors equals several generations and therefore many users kept them beyond this change, so the compilers continued to support them for many more years, more precisely another 13 years because it has been just until now, with the announcement of the LLVM compiler:
“This instruction set was only compatible with AMD chips starting with the K6-2 released in 1998 and up to the Bulldozer family in 2011. They were never really used, as they were replaced by SSE (first implemented by AMD once in 2001). “Since no one uses the AMD 3DNow! instruction sets anymore, simply removing them seems to be the best option.”
Well, actually, AMD 3DNow! instructions were very popular in the late 90s and early 2000s to improve gaming performance, video playback, and complex workflows. But then Intel came along with its SSE instruction set and they were considered better, so they became dominant to the point that AMD itself started adopting it in 2001.
Developers who need to continue programming for older AMD processors can still use the 3DNow instruction set in assembler, including inline code with LLVM. Other than that, everything related to 3DNow is already very obsolete and not used, so it’s not that it’s a big loss, but hey, the truth is that whoever signs this article remembers well AMD’s promotion in this matter and does not stop being somewhat nostalgic.