The full form of SSE3 is Streaming SIMD Extensions 3

SSE3, Streaming SIMD Extensions 3, also known by its Intel code name Prescott New Instructions (PNI), is the third iteration of the SSE instruction set for the IA-32 (x86) architecture. Intel introduced SSE3 in early 2004 with the Prescott revision of their Pentium 4 CPU. In April 2005, AMD introduced a subset of SSE3 in revision E (Venice and San Diego) of their Athlon 64 CPUs. The earlier SIMD instruction sets on the x86 platform, from oldest to newest, are MMX, 3DNow! (developed by AMD, but not supported by Intel processors), SSE, and SSE2.

SSE3 contains 13 new instructions over SSE2.

The most notable change is the capability to work horizontally in a register, as opposed to the more or less strictly vertical operation of all previous SSE instructions. More specifically, instructions to add and subtract the multiple values stored within a single register have been added. These instructions can be used to speed up the implementation of a number of DSP and 3D operations. There is also a new instruction to convert floating point values to integers without having to change the global rounding mode, thus avoiding costly pipeline stalls. Finally, the extension adds LDDQU, an alternative misaligned integer vector load that has better performance on NetBurst based platforms for loads that cross cacheline boundaries.