official-stockfish/Stockfish — pull request #86 by lucasart (2014-11-01 06:07:42+00:00)
Title: Correctly describe POPCNT compile

SSE4.2 has nothing to do with POPCNT. We must dispell this myth, because
Stockfish is a reference and many will copy this mistake if they see it in
Stockfish:
* SSE is an SIMD instruction set, relative to vectorization (using special
128-bit registers).
* POPCNT/LZCNT work on normal registers (eg. AL, AX, EAX, RAX).

The confusion comes from the fact that, in the Intel product line, it just
so happens that SSE4.2 and POPCNT/LZCNT came out at the same time. But this
is not true for AMD. For example, all AMD Pheniom II have SSE3 but no
POPCNT/LZCNT, and that is why the modern compile uses `-msse3 -popcnt` and
not `-msse4.2`.

No functional change.