Historic AMD 3DNow! The instruction set is finally extinct, and a new version of the open source compiler LLVM 19, which will be released in September or October, will eventually remove support for it.

From now on, unless you use assembly language, you will never see this instruction set again.

The story dates back to 1996 when Intel's Pentium processor introduced the MMX instruction set, significantly enhancing its multimedia processing capabilities. However, MMX only supported integer operations, leaving floating point operations reliant on the outdated x87 coprocessor instructions.

In 1998, AMD introduced its own instruction set, 3DNow! (short for '3D No Waiting'), comprising 21 instructions that supported single-precision floating-point vector operations. This advancement boosted 3D performance.

The K6-2 was the first processor to support 3DNow!, making it the first x86 processor capable of executing floating-point SIMD instructions and enabling AMD to outperform Intel in gaming performance for the first time.

The subsequent Athlon upgrade introduced Extended 3DNow!, adding five more instructions and delivering even better performance.

In 1999, Intel released its SSE instruction set, which covered all the functionalities of 3DNow! and doubled single-precision floating-point performance, eliminating the need for x87 instructions.

Following this, 3DNow! gradually fell out of favor. AMD's newer Athlon processors also adopted SSE, moving on to SSE2 and SSE3.

By 2010, AMD announced it would discontinue 3DNow!, retaining only two prefetch instructions, PREFETCH and PREFETCHW.

In 2021, the Linux system kernel ceased support for 3DNow!.