The Linux kernel will retire AMD 3DNow! Instruction set, 23 years of service is finally retiring

As part of the Linux 5.17 kernel changes, code for the AMD 3DNow! instruction set will be discarded and changes will be committed. This code has been around in the Linux kernel for 23 years, and it's finally time to retire from the stage of history. Future AMD processors and support for 3DNow! will not be able to run these instruction sets in the Linux kernel.

AMD released the 3DNow! instruction set in 1998, which is built on top of the MMX instruction set to provide higher performance for vector processing of floating-point data. The 3DNow! instruction set contains 21 new instructions, first applied to the K6-2 processor, making it the first x86 processor capable of executing floating-point SIMD instructions. When AMD released the Athlon processor in 1999, it added five new instructions to the 3DNow! instruction set, becoming an extended 3DNow! instruction set.

During the turn of the century, the 3DNow! instruction set was supported by many manufacturers in the industry, and had a wide range of applications, improving the performance of games, video playback, and even image processing. From K6-2 to Bullozer-architecture AMD processors, the 3DNow! instruction set can be found.

To counter the 3DNow! instruction set, Intel subsequently introduced the SSE instruction set, and fully supports the IEEE754 standard, greatly improving single-precision floating-point processing speed while providing almost all the functions of the 3DNow! instruction set. With the release of the Pentium III processor, the SSE instruction set gradually dominated, and later AMD began to adopt it in 2000 when it released the Athlon processor code-named Thunderbird.

AMD officials announced back in 2010 that "3DNow!" would no longer be set in the new processors. Instructions" feature flag bit, which will no longer be supported by some processors in the future.