Editing 3DNow! (section)

==History==
3DNow! was developed at a time when [[3D graphics]] were becoming mainstream in PC multimedia and games.  Realtime display of 3D graphics depended heavily on the host CPU's floating-point unit (FPU) to perform [[floating-point]] calculations, a task in which AMD's [[AMD K6|K6 processor]] was easily outperformed by its competitor, the Intel Pentium II.

As an enhancement to the [[MMX (instruction set)|MMX]] instruction set, the 3DNow! instruction-set augmented the MMX SIMD registers to support common arithmetic operations (add/subtract/multiply) on single-precision (32-bit) floating-point data.  Software written to use AMD's 3DNow! instead of the slower [[x87|x87 FPU]] could execute up to four times faster, depending on the instruction mix.