Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions

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The Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions or MAX are a set of SIMD computational units that were developed by HP for their PA-RISC line of processors.

The MAX-1 were released with PA-RISC 7100LC in 1994. It is usually attributed as being the first SIMD extensions to be integrated in a microprocessor.

The MAX-2 appeared in the PA-8000 processor.

These computational units offer an instruction set to allow SIMD processing of 16-bit integers packed in general purpose registers. The available functionality includes additions, subtractions and shifts.