Home

Overview

Why MMX

MMX in-depth

Future Development

Why MMX?!

The volume and complexity of data processed by today's computer has increased EXPONENTIALLY, this leads to a incredible increase on Demand for better(faster, and cheaper) microprocessor.  The Intel MMX technology is designed to accelerate multimedia applications.  The new technology includes new instructions and data types and allow applications to achieve a "new" level of performance.  It uses the parallelism inherent in many multimedia algorithms, yet maintains the same compatibility with existing operating systems and all its applications.

The MMX technology is designed as a set of integer instructions that can be easily applied to the need of the wide diversity of multimedia. Some of the technical highlights are :

Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) technique
57 new instructions
Eight 64-bit wide MMX registers
Four new data types

The basis for MMX technology is a technique called Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD). This allows many pieces of information to be processed with a single instruction, providing parallelism that greatly increases performance. This technology combined with the IA superscalar architecture will provide substantial performance enhancement to the PC platform. (What is this? A RISC processor?!)

All in all, MMX does provide higher performance comparing to the
original Pentium processor. There is a 10-20% more performance on current software(1, 2), over 60% faster on Intel Media Benchmark, which measures Intel MMX technology multimedia performance  Micro-architectural enhancements over the original Pentium processor

Full support of Intel MMX media enhancement technology
Doubled code and data caches to 16K each
Improved branch prediction
Enhanced pipeline
Deeper write buffers

Fully compatible with all software written for the Pentium processor, and the Intel486TM and Intel386TM processors.  

 

Copyright University of Maryland.
For problems or questions regarding this web contact [ProjectEmail].
Last updated: December 20, 1998.