Page "Central processing unit" Paragraph 59

Most early vector CPUs, such as the Cray-1, were associated almost exclusively with scientific research and cryptography applications.

However, as multimedia has largely shifted to digital media, the need for some form of SIMD in general-purpose CPUs has become significant.

Shortly after inclusion of floating point execution units started to become commonplace in general-purpose processors, specifications for and implementations of SIMD execution units also began to appear for general-purpose CPUs.

Some of these early SIMD specifications like HP's Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions ( MAX ) and Intel's MMX were integer-only.

This proved to be a significant impediment for some software developers, since many of the applications that benefit from SIMD primarily deal with floating point numbers.

Progressively, these early designs were refined and remade into some of the common, modern SIMD specifications, which are usually associated with one ISA.

Some notable modern examples are Intel's SSE and the PowerPC-related AltiVec ( also known as VMX ).