I’m wondering, 3DNow! Interesting. Especially interesting is the LinuxJournal article that was published on 3DNow! back in 1999. They were using laser range data processing as an example! Yes, indeed, sophisticated people we have here on GNU/Linux. Yeah, so no wonder why GNU/Linux developers were so fast to pick up on the technology. It’s likely that one of the contributors was subscribed to LinuxJournal and wrote up the patches to FFMpeg.
20170416/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow! 20170416/http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3685