Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/03/04/16:38:04
nik wrote:
> > MMX is MultiMedia eXtensions in the new range of Pentium processors.
> > Supposed to make any graphics intensive software (including games) go a
> > whole lot faster. But I'm not sure how this will affect users of non-MMX
> > processors. Will MMX code run on the lower processors? Or will
> > programmers have to write two sets of code, MMX-enabled and MMX-disabled?
>
> you'd need something equivalent to the fpu emulator to run it ;(
> basically mmx would run slower on non mmx machines and hence won't be much
> use for a few years to come until enough of the market has them.
> the speed increase isn't so great from what i've seen though, there are problems
> with caching writes or something as i recall.
Years?, I'm not so sure. When I downloaded the MMX specifications 3 months ago
one of my friend said: "Intel will implement that in more than 1 year, not in
months ..." was too wrong.
Actually the base platform is moving to the Intel architecture and in some
month you'll get only Pentium motherboards.
The main purpose of the MMX is to write device drivers so I guess that you'll
see that the manufaturers (of hardwar and softwar) will ship drivers for 386
and for MMX. Think about it, MMX will speed up things like video-conference
a lot, so an enterprise supporting MMX will have a better product, for example
with your software you'll be able to have more people talking in the
video-conference using the same CPU power.
There are a lot of things that will be benefited from it and one of the
things could be the DirectX drivers ...
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Salvador Eduardo Tropea (SET).
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