Inside Intel's MMX

Intel recently launched the new Pentium CPU. The Pentium® processor with MMX™ technology, People have had a number of questions regarding the abilities of the new architecture, and what this means in more important terms...GAMES!

MMX has already begun shipping on selected Pentium chips running at 166Mhz and 200Mhz. The addition of the enhancement is expected to provide between 10% and 20% increased performance on existing applications (due primarily to the increased size of on-board caches). Intel says up to 60% improvement on future applications is expected when programmed to take specific advantage of the MMX enhancement.

For gamers this will largely take the form of better audio, better framerates, and potentially better lighting effects as well as texture smoothing due to better integer performance. What MMX is not going to do, is inherently remove the need for a 3D accelerator board such as the Rendition or 3Dfx boards which perform many graphic specific functions in hardware that MMX could never do by itself. MMX will not provide the leap in graphics (at least for now) that these boards currently provide.

As a matter of fact, in some respects, MMX is likely to hinder some elements of 3D games given that the use of the MMX instruction set greatly reduces the floating point calculation capabilities of the Pentium. The optimal solution to this is the combination of MMX with a 3D accelerator such as the Rendition Verite chipset that has its own geometry engine.

Here's the lowdown for the specifications on the Pentium MMX chips:

• Full support for Intel MMX technology. MMX technology is based on SIMD technique - Single Instruction, Multiple Data - which enables increased performance on a wide variety of multimedia and communications applications. Fifty-seven new instructions and four new 64-bit data types are supported in the Pentium processor with MMX technology. All existing operating system and application software are fully-compatible with the Pentium processor with MMX technology.
• Doubled code and data caches to 16K each. On chip level 1 data and code cache sizes have been doubled to 16KB each on the Pentium processor with MMX technology. Larger separate internal caches improve performance by reducing average memory access time and providing fast access to recently-used instructions and data. The instruction and data caches can be accessed simultaneously while the data cache supports two data references simultaneously. The data cache supports a write-back (or alternatively, write-through, on a line by line basis) policy for memory updates.
• Improved branch prediction. Dynamic branch prediction uses the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) to boost performance by predicting the most likely set of instructions to be executed. The BTB has been improved on the Pentium processor with MMX technology to increase its accuracy.
• Enhanced pipeline. To improve performance, an additional pipeline stage has been added.
• Deeper write buffers.. A pool of four write buffers is now shared between the dual pipelines to improve memory write performance.

So in other words. It can be a great chip to run all those cool games. Will we see some great games because of this chip. Not for some time. BUT having this new state of the art chip in your new machine will give your computer a jolt once software designers get to know it. As for an upgrade for your motherboard...Only OverDrive sockets are being supported at the moment and looks like this. The first half of '97 will have OverDrive ship speeds up to 166 MHz. Second half of '97 will support speeds up to 200 MHz.

Intel is shiping new chipsets with new computers. So till then look for this logo on New Computers.

Visit Intel's Site for the latest on the new MMX chips at MMX Home page