SSE2, Streaming SIMD Extensions 2, is one of the Intel SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) processor supplementary instruction sets first introduced by Intel with the initial version of the Pentium 4 in 2001. It extends the earlier SSE instruction set, and is intended to fully supplant MMX. Intel extended SSE2 to create SSE3 in 2004. SSE2 added 144 new instructions to SSE, which has 70 instructions. Rival chip-maker AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their Opteron and Athlon 64 ranges of AMD64 64-bit CPUs in 2003.
Read more about SSE2: Changes, Differences Between X87 FPU and SSE2, Differences Between MMX and SSE2, Compiler Usage, CPUs Supporting SSE2, Notable IA-32 CPUs Not Supporting SSE2