A single instruction is applied to multiple data points simultaneously.
e.g. for increasing the brightness of an image, the instruction “increase brightness by 10%” is applied to multiple data points (the pixels) simultaneously.
This is a form of data parallelism and is highly efficient for tasks with regular repetitive operations on large datasets.
Modern CPUs and GPUs have specialized SIMD instruction sets (like SSE and AVX) to perform these vector operations.
Scaling