The only official thing left is the manual for SimNow, an ancient piece of development software that used it, with the Athlon/Opteron 64-bit CPUs.

https://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/201 … Manual4.6.1.pdf

And there are some archived materials here.....

https://kib.kiev.ua/x86docs/AMD/AMD-3DNow/

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2022-07-28, 13:03:

The only official thing left is the manual for SimNow, an ancient piece of development software that used it, with the Athlon/Op […]
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The only official thing left is the manual for SimNow, an ancient piece of development software that used it, with the Athlon/Opteron 64-bit CPUs.

https://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/201 … Manual4.6.1.pdf

And there are some archived materials here.....

https://kib.kiev.ua/x86docs/AMD/AMD-3DNow/

Thanks - the porting guide in the archived materials is very helpful!

Interesting question, whatcha tryin to do? 😀

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-28, 18:28:

Interesting question, whatcha tryin to do? 😀

I'm working on a game engine with Windows 9x support. For some critical routines I'm also writing SSE implementations and the SSE instructions are very well documented online. For example, culing a leaf in the BSP tree with an AABB test is something that happens many times each frame, and can be optimized with SSE instructions (this test can be branchless with SSE). I wanted to also add 3DNow! routines but it's been difficult to find good documentation on it - knowing what the instructions are is one thing but best practices are another.

Any help from 3dmark? They advertised support for these instructions.

lizard78 wrote on 2022-07-28, 12:46:

Hi there,
I was wondering if anyone knew of any additional documentation for the 3DNow! instruction set (or analysis).

This might help:

https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/22466.pdf

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-28, 18:57:

Any help from 3dmark? They advertised support for these instructions.

Hmm, probably not - unless the source is available for the tool. Although one of the pdfs in the archive RetroGamer posted is very helpful, was almost exactly what I was looking for. "3DNow! Instruction Porting Guide" from August 1999. The site is down now - glad I downloaded earlier! This document has a lot of detail about best practices when coding for the K6 CPUs. I'll of course still take any other information any one else is able to turn up 😀.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-07-28, 19:00:

lizard78 wrote on 2022-07-28, 12:46:

Hi there,
I was wondering if anyone knew of any additional documentation for the 3DNow! instruction set (or analysis).

This might help:

https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/22466.pdf

Thanks!

Anything of use in the k6-2+ datasheet?

https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/23542a.pdf

Most 3DNow instructions are just early variants (designed to work with MMX registers) of integer instructions that were later included in SSE or SSE2. If you know SSE it should be easy enough to understand what they do just from their names.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-07-29, 01:32:

Anything of use in the k6-2+ datasheet?

https://www.amd.com/system/files/TechDocs/23542a.pdf

Thanks!

jmarsh wrote on 2022-07-29, 02:36:

Most 3DNow instructions are just early variants (designed to work with MMX registers) of integer instructions that were later included in SSE or SSE2. If you know SSE it should be easy enough to understand what they do just from their names.

What each instruction does is pretty obvious (that much can be gathered from wikipedia even) but what I'm really looking for is documentation around best practices / pitfalls. Think I more or less found what I needed in the porting guide that was posted.

Thanks all!