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 replace
MMX. Intel extended SSE2 to create
SSE3 in 2004. SSE2 added 144 new instructions to SSE, which has 70 instructions. Competing chip-maker
AMD added support for SSE2 with the introduction of their
Opteron and
Athlon 64 ranges of
AMD64 64-bit CPUs in 2003.