The XOP (eXtended Operations) instruction set, announced by AMD on May 1, 2009, is an extension to the 128-bit SSE core instructions in the x86 and AMD64 instruction set for the Bulldozer processor core, which was released on October 12, 2011. However AMD removed support for XOP from Zen (microarchitecture) onward. The XOP instruction set contains several different types of vector instructions since it was originally intended as a major upgrade to SSE. Most of the instructions are integer instructions, but it also contains floating point permutation and floating point fraction extraction instructions. See the index for a list of instruction types. History XOP is a revised subset of what was originally intended as SSE5. It was changed to be similar but not overlapping with AVX, parts that overlapped with AVX were removed or moved to separate standards such as FMA4 (floating-point vector multiply–accumulate) and CVT16 (Half-precision floating-point conversion implemented as F16C by Intel). All SSE5 instructions that were equivalent or similar to instructions in the AVX and FMA4 instruction sets announced by Intel have been changed to use the coding proposed by Intel. Integer instructions without equivalents in AVX were classified as the XOP extension. The XOP instructions have an opcode byte 8F (hexadecimal), but otherwise almost identical coding scheme as AVX with the 3-byte VEX prefix. Commentators have seen this as evidence that Intel has not allowed AMD to use any part of the large VEX coding space. AMD has been forced to use different codes in order to avoid using any code combination that Intel might possibly be using in its development pipeline for something else. The XOP coding scheme is as close to the VEX scheme as technically possible without risking that the AMD codes overlap with future Intel codes. This inference is speculative, since no public information is available about negotiations between the two companies on this issue. The use of the 8F byte requires that the m-bits (see VEX coding scheme) have a value larger than or equal to 8 in order to avoid overlap with existing instructions. The C4 byte used in the VEX scheme has no such restriction. This may prevent the use of the m-bits for other purposes in the future in the XOP scheme, but not in the VEX scheme. Another possible problem is that the pp bits have the value 00 in the XOP scheme, while they have the