1. Technical Field
One or more embodiments of the present invention relate generally to the field of computer systems. More particularly, one or more embodiments of the present invention relate to the field of add-compare-select operations performed by computer systems.
2. Description of Related Art
To address the needs of multi-media, communications, and graphics applications, computer systems have been designed to support one or more digital signal processing techniques to process, for example, analog data, video data, and/or audio data. Pattern recognition is one digital signal processing technique that may be used, for example, for error correction in communications applications, for image recognition applications, for speech recognition applications, and for handwriting recognition applications. Digital signal processing techniques typically use sophisticated algorithms that perform the same operations, such as an add-compare-select operation for example, on a relatively large number of data in units of bytes, words, or doublewords, for example.
A typical computer system supports add-compare-select operations with multiple instructions and one or more arithmetic logic units. As one example, the Intel® 32-bit Architecture as defined by Intel® Corporation of Santa Clara, Calif. supports add-compare-select operations with various instructions to add packed data and with various instructions to compare packed data.