EMMS

Empty MMX Technology State

stableVMJITAOTinstruction

Encodings

Measured cost

Description#

Sets the values of all the tags in the x87 FPU tag word to empty (all 1s). This operation marks the x87 FPU data registers (which are aliased to the MMX technology registers) as available for use by x87 FPU floating-point instructions. (See Figure 8-7 in the Intel(R) 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual, Volume 1, for the format of the x87 FPU tag word.) All other MMX instructions (other than the EMMS instruction) set all the tags in x87 FPU tag word to valid (all 0s).

The EMMS instruction must be used to clear 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. If a floating-point instruction loads one of the registers in the x87 FPU data register stack before the x87 FPU tag word has been reset by the EMMS instruction, an x87 floating-point register stack overflow can occur that will result in an x87 floating-point exception or incorrect result.

EMMS operation is the same in non-64-bit modes and 64-bit mode.

Operation#

x87FPUTagWord := FFFFH;

Intel C/C++ compiler intrinsics#

void _mm_empty();

Flags affected#

None

Exceptions

Sources

• This instruction in the Intel manual
• Latency and throughput per microarchitecture