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[Chan]

These two CPU types keep popping up in my searches. What do they mean and/or what are they?

[v0id]

As a normal user, you don't need to worry about this.
As an assembly programmer, you don't need to worry about this, but you can.

SSE2 and SSE3 are both instruction sets for IA-32. SSE3 is newer than SSE2, and have added 13 new instructions, to work with arithmetic, array structures and multithreading. It's so complex, so it's hard to tell it all - and I don't know much more about it, than I just told you.

You might want to look at Intel's manual, there's probably something interesting about it, if you want to know more. But as I said, a normal user don't need to worry about it - they don't even need to know it exists.

If you follow this link, you can download the six well-known Intel manuals, and some papers on the changes as well. Vol. 1, 2A, 2B, 3A, 3B and Optimization Reference are the six, that's worth looking into.