SIMD within a register (SWAR), also known by the name "packed SIMD" is a technique for performing parallel operations on data contained in a processor register. SIMD stands for single instruction, multiple data. Flynn's 1972 taxonomy categorises SWAR as "pipelined processing". Many modern general-purpose computer processors have some provisions for SIMD, in the form of a group of registers and instructions to make use of them. SWAR refers to the use of those registers and instructions, as opposed to using specialized processing engines designed to be better at SIMD operations. It also refers to the use of SIMD with general-purpose registers and instructions that were not meant to do it at the time, by way of various novel software tricks. SWAR architectures A SWAR architecture is one that includes instructions explicitly intended to perform parallel operations across data that is stored in the independent subwords or fields of a register. A SWAR-capable architecture is one that includes a set of instructions that is sufficient to allow data stored in these fields to be treated independently even though the architecture does not include instructions that are explicitly intended for that purpose. An early example of a SWAR architecture was the Intel Pentium with MMX, which implemented the MMX extension set. The Intel Pentium, by contrast, did not include such instructions, but could still act as a SWAR architecture through careful hand-coding or compiler techniques. Early SWAR architectures include DEC Alpha , Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC MAX, Silicon Graphics Incorporated's MIPS MDMX, and Sun's SPARC V9 VIS. Like MMX, many of the SWAR instruction sets are intended for faster video coding. History of the SWAR programming model Wesley A. Clark introduced partitioned subword data operations in the 1950s. This can be seen as a very early predecessor to SWAR. Leslie Lamport presented SWAR techniques in his paper titled "Multiple byte processing with full-word instructions" in 1975. With the introduction of Intel's MMX multimedia instruction set extensions in 1996, desktop processors with SIMD parallel processing capabilities became common. Early on, these instructions could only be used via hand-written assembly code. In the fall of 1996, Professor Hank Dietz was the instructor for the undergraduate Compiler Construction course at Purdue University's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. For this course, he assigned a series of projects in which the students would build a simple compiler targeting MMX. The input language was a subset dialect of MasPar's