LLVM Picks Up 3DNow! Improvements In 2017

As a flashback to the past, hitting the LLVM Git/SVN code today were improvements for those still running with processors supporting AMD's 3DNow! extensions.

3DNow! as a refresher for those not in the processor game too long were AMD's x86 instruction set addition for SIMD data support for vector processing. 3D Now had been introduced during the K6 days and supported until the release of the Bulldozer microarchitecture. 3DNow had been of some benefit during the early days of 3D computer gaming, but it's been a long time (years) since seeing any news about it.

Thus it came as a surprise this afternoon when seeing this commit to LLVM. An independent contributor to LLVM added the 3DNow instruction itinerary and scheduling class data to this compiler stack.

So if you're still running an AMD K6 up until Bulldozer CPU, with the upcoming LLVM 6.0 release you may find better performance. Unfortunately I no longer have any pre-Bulldozer systems still setup for benchmarking.