I was arguing with a friend about SSE2 (Intel's SIMD vector CPU instructions), and how useless it is to most general computer programs.
But he correctly pointed out any analog simulation (SPICE) likely use floating-point numeric computations. Furthermore, he claimed that in native 64-bit mode, the AMD64/EM64T instruction-set doesn't have x87 (legacy FPU) instructions. A 64-bit application MUST use SSE registers for all floating-point math.
I'm not much of a programmer, so is this true? If so, are the 64-bit/linux versions of EDA tools specifically optimized for the SSE instruction set?