[Glitch toString];

A week or so ago someone asked me if I had any experience with the Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE). While I often answer the question "What's your favorite programming language?" with "Assembly!", I sadly have never had the opportunity to make use of SSE, nor did I truly know the specifics of the extensions (like, just where I'd use it).

So, to counter this deficiency, I've been poking around learning more and more about them. Which lead me to realize just how out of date my assembly books are. So I did what I normally do when that happens -- I ran to Amazon to correct the problem. Only to find that not only are there very few assembly books published recently, but of the 2-4 books worth getting only one has a decent coverage of SSE (or so it seems..). Most don't seem to cover the floating point unit very well, or x64 at all. Not that it's a huge task to look at the instruction set and figure it out, but if you're writing a book on assembly why not cover topics that modern assembly usage would exploit? I mean one book released in the past 2 years even had a chapter dedicated to TSRs, is that even relevant today?

I can't imagine an author would spend the time writing a book on assembly without covering, x64, floating point, and at least up to SSE 3. SSE 3 has been around since Intel's Pentium 4 Prescott chips, which have been around since 2004. Even that is possibly on the verge of rendering a book out of date very shortly, considering SSE 4 is in C2Ds, and 5 was announced last Aug.

Almost everyone would agree that no one is writing full applications with assembly anymore (at least outside of the embedded worlds), so why wouldn't an assembly book contain the most up to date (read: advanced) material? No one is going to drop out of C/C++ to 'speed up' their code with simple 32bit instructions that their compiler is probably far more skilled at optimizing.

It boggles the mind.

I'm going to pick up the one book that looks decent. I'm also going through Microsoft's info on the Visual C++ SSE intrinsics. So, maybe I'll have some XNA GS vs. Native performance showdowns soon. >:)