Prescott marks the introduction of Intel’s latest extensions to the IA-32 ISA, adding thirteen new instructions. Most of these new instructions make use of the Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) registers, and as a result, Intel has named the new instructions SSE3.

The majority of these instructions relate to graphics and complex arithmetic operations. Two of the instructions were designed to help software make better use of the processor’s Hyper-Threading capability by helping to indicate when a thread may no longer be engaged in useful work.

Naturally the benefits of these added instructions will not become apparent until software developers begin to make use of them. As is generally the case with instruction set extensions, there will be particular pieces of software or particular operations that exhibit very tangible performance improvements, while others really have no use for the added instructions, and thus show no change.