Editing Visual Instruction Set (section)

== Functionality ==
VIS re-uses existing SPARC V9 64-bit floating point registers to hold multiple 8, 16, or 32-bit integer values. In this respect, VIS is more similar to the design of [[MMX (instruction set)|MMX]] than other SIMD architectures such as [[Streaming SIMD Extensions|SSE]]/[[SSE2]]/[[AltiVec]].

VIS includes a number of operations primarily for graphics support, so most of them are only for integers. These include 3D to 2D conversion, [[edge detection|edge processing]] and pixel distance.

There are four ways to use VIS in code:
*The [[GNU Compiler Collection|GCC]] -{{text|mvis}} option
*Use [[inline assembly]]
*Use inline template in [[VSDK]], similar to [[compiler intrinsics]], which have C function like interfaces
*Use the [[mediaLib]] multimedia library, which has C function interfaces. It uses VIS on SPARC platforms (and MMX/SSE/SSE2 on x86/x64 platforms) to accelerate multimedia application execution