Intel ARCHITECTURE IA-32 - Manual (Page 184)

IA-32 Intel® Architecture Optimization
3-4
To find out whether the operating system supports SSE, execute an SSE
instruction and trap for an exception if one occurs. Catching the
exception in a simple try/except clause (using structured exception
handling in C++) and checking whether the exception code is an invalid
opcode will give you the answer. See Example 3-3.
Example 3-2 Identification of SSE with cpuid
…identify existence of cpuid instruction
… ; identify signature is genuine intel
mov eax, 1 ; request for feature flags
cpuid ; 0Fh, 0A2h cpuid instruction
test EDX, 002000000h ; bit 25 in feature flags equal to 1
jnz Found
Example 3-3 Identification of SSE by the OS
bool OSSupportCheck() {
_try {
__asm xorps xmm0, xmm0 ;Streaming SIMD Extension
}
_except(EXCEPTION_EXECUTE_HANDLER) {
if (_exception_code()==STATUS_ILLEGAL_INSTRUCTION)
/* SSE not supported */
return (false);
}
/* SSE are supported by OS */
return (true);
}