SIMD - History

History

The first use of SIMD instructions was in vector supercomputers of the early 1970s such as the CDC Star-100 and the Texas Instruments ASC, which could operate on a "vector" of data with a single instruction. Vector processing was especially popularized by Cray in the 1970s and 1980s. Vector-processing architectures are now considered separate from SIMD machines, based on the fact that vector machines processed the vectors one word at a time through pipelined processors (though still based on a single instruction), whereas modern SIMD machines process all elements of the vector simultaneously.

The first era of modern SIMD machines was characterized by massively parallel processing-style supercomputers such as the Thinking Machines CM-1 and CM-2. These machines had many limited-functionality processors that would work in parallel. For example, each of 64,000 processors in a Thinking Machines CM-2 would execute the same instruction at the same time, allowing, for instance multiplications on 64,000 pairs of numbers at a time. Supercomputing moved away from the SIMD approach when inexpensive scalar MIMD approaches based on commodity processors such as the Intel i860 XP became more powerful, and interest in SIMD waned.

The current era of SIMD processors grew out of the desktop-computer market rather than the supercomputer market. As desktop processors became powerful enough to support real-time gaming and video processing, demand grew for this particular type of computing power, and microprocessor vendors turned to SIMD to meet the demand. Sun Microsystems introduced SIMD integer instructions in its "VIS" instruction set extensions in 1995, in its UltraSPARC I microprocessor. MIPS followed suite with their similar MDMX system.

The first widely-deployed desktop SIMD was with Intel's MMX extensions to the x86 architecture in 1996. This sparked the introduction of the much more powerful AltiVec system in the Motorola PowerPC's and IBM's POWER systems. Intel responded in 1999 by introducing the all-new SSE system. Since then, there have been several extensions to the SIMD instruction sets for both architectures.

All of these developments have been oriented toward support for real-time graphics, and are therefore oriented toward processing in two, three, or four dimensions, usually with vector lengths of between two and sixteen words, depending on data type and architecture. When new SIMD architectures need to be distinguished from older ones, the newer architectures are then considered "short-vector" architectures, as earlier SIMD and vector supercomputers had vector lengths from 64 to 64,000. A modern supercomputer is almost always a cluster of MIMD machines, each of which implements (short-vector) SIMD instructions. A modern desktop computer is often a multiprocessor MIMD machine where each processor can execute short-vector SIMD instructions.