AMD Updates LLVM Compiler and Drops 3DNow! Instruction Set

TapTechNews July 20th news, AMD updated the LLVM compiler and gave up supporting the iconic 3DNow! instruction set.

AMD first launched the 3DNow! instruction set on AMD's K6-2 CPU in 1998 to compete with Intel's MMX instruction set, hoping to outperform Intel in the field of floating-point operations.

The 3DNow! instruction set can be directly compatible with the x86 architecture without any modifications. This instruction set was later replaced by the more powerful SSE extension series, so 3DNow! gradually became obsolete over time.

Although the 3DNow! instruction set has been停用 (discontinued) for many years, AMD's LLVM compiler still supported this instruction set before, and now the official finally gave up the support.

TapTechNews translated the internal of the GitHub proposal as follows:

AMD chips, from K6-2 (introduced in 1998) to the Bulldozer series (introduced in 2011), supported this instruction set.

These instructions were never widely used because they were actually replaced by the more widely implemented SSE (AMD first implemented it in AthlonXP in 2001).

Currently, almost no one uses the 3DNow! instruction set, and currently mainstream hardware does not support deployment, and simply removing it is the best solution.