Intel® VTune™ Amplifier XE and Intel® VTune™ Amplifier for Systems Help
SIMD assists are invoked when an EMMS instruction is executed after MMX technology code has changed the MMX state in the floating point stack. The EMMS instruction clears the MMX technology state at the end of all MMX technology procedures or subroutines and before calling other procedures or subroutines that may execute x87 floating-point instructions, which can incur a performance penalty when intermixing MMX and X87 instructions. The SIMD assists are required in the streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) instructions with denormal input when the DAZ (Denormals Are Zeros) flag is off or underflow result when the FTZ (Flush To Zero) flag is off.
A significant portion of execution time is spent in SIMD assists. Consider enabling the DAZ (Denormals Are Zero) and/or FTZ (Flush To Zero) options in your compiler to flush denormals to zero. This option may improve performance if the denormal values are not critical in your application. Also note that the DAZ and FTZ modes are not compatible with the IEEE Standard 754.