Identify the Types of SIMD Instructions

• Download demo project - 21.11 KB
• Download source - 28.33 KB

Introduction

I have been learning and writing SSE2 intrinsic instructions but I did not find an article on CodeProject that has sample code for me to identify the presence of SIMD instructions on processor, hence I wrote a simple class to do it. I hope that people who need this information can save some time using this class, without having to roll out their own class.

The HasSIMD Class

Here is the class declaration. I guess there is no need for sample code. It is simple to use.

class HasSIMD
{
public:
// Intel SIMD
    bool HasMMX()
    bool HasSSE()
    bool HasSSE2()
    bool HasSSE3()
    bool HasSSSE3()
    bool HasSSE41()
    bool HasSSE42()
// AMD SIMD
    bool HasMMXplus()
    bool Has3Dnow()
    bool Has3DnowExt()
};

Important Notes on Symmetric Multiprocessor(SMP) System

Beware of SMP systems, the processors used should be identical, hence the word, "symmetric". Or else, the class may detect that one of the processors supports this SIMD. When it runs this SIMD instruction on another non-identical processor which doesn't supports this SIMD, your program may crash.

References

• CPUID on Wikipedia
• Intel CPUID documentation(PDF)
• AMD CPUID documentation(PDF)
• The "symmetric" in symmetric multiprocessing really means "symmetric"

History

• 01/09/2008: Version 1.1.0 includes bug fix for 3DNow, 3DNow+ and MMX+ detection by Leonardo Tazzini
• 27/08/2008: First release