SIMD processing
Processors that issue a single instruction, involving one or two data items, per clock cycle, are referred to as scalar processors. Processors capable of issuing multiple instructions per clock cycle, though not explicitly executing vector processing instructions, are called superscalar processors. Some algorithms benefit from explicitly vectorized execution, which means performing the same operation on multiple data items simultaneously. Processor instructions tailored to such tasks are called single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instructions.
The simultaneously issued instructions in superscalar processors are generally performing different tasks on different data, representing a multiple instruction, multiple data (MIMD) parallel processing system. Some processing operations, such as the dot product operation used in digital signal processing described in Chapter 6, Specialized Computing Domains, perform the same mathematical operation on an array of values...
