From:	Shawn Hargreaves <Shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
Newsgroups:	comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject:	Re: MMX
Date:	Sun, 22 Dec 1996 11:05:50 +0000
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Message-ID:	<EvRy8DAOYRvyEwas@talula.demon.co.uk>
References:	<19961221 DOT 171924 DOT 8327 DOT 4 DOT chambersb AT juno DOT com>
NNTP-Posting-Host:	talula.demon.co.uk
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To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
DJ-Gateway:	from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp

Benjamin D Chambers writes:
>I saw a lot of posts about Intel MMX.
>What is it?

It's a set of multimedia extensions to the Pentium chipset. It's a while
since I looked at any MMX info, but as I recall, it carries out simple
integer operations (move, compare, add, etc) in parallel, ie. one MMX
instruction operates on many memory addresses. 

According to Intel, this will revolutionise graphics coding and sample
mixing, among other things, but I was less than convinced. For one
thing, I didn't think the MMX instructions would be applicable to
texture mapping, which strikes me as one of the most important tasks a
next-generation multimedia system needs to deal with. But more
importantly, MMX reuses the floating point stack for its registers, so
MMX and floating point instructions can't be used side by side. Argh!
Given that an MMX system would probably have wavetable sound and video
acceleration hardware in any case, if forced to choose between floating
point and MMX, I'd take the floating point...

/*
 *  Shawn Hargreaves - shawn AT talula DOT demon DOT co DOT uk - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
 *  Ghoti: 'gh' as in 'enough', 'o' as in 'women', and 'ti' as in 'nation'.
 */

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