What is Pentium MMX?
| PROCESSOR SPECIFICATIONS | ||
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| Manufacturer: | Intel | |
| Model: | Pentium MMX | |
| Year: | 1997 | |
| Transistors: | 4,500,000 | |
| Microns: | 0.35µ | |
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Intel released many different flavors of the Pentium processor. One of the more improved flavors was the Pentium MMX, released in 1997. It was a move by Intel to improve the original Pentium and make it better serve the needs in the multimedia and performance department. One of the key enhancements, and where it gets its name from, is the MMX instruction set. The MMX instructions were an extension off the normal instruction set. The 57 additional streamlined instructions helped the processor perform certain key tasks in a streamlined fashion, allowing it to do some tasks with one instruction that it would have taken more regular instructions to do. It paid off, too. The Pentium MMX performed up to 10-20% faster with standard software, and higher with software optimized for the MMX instructions. Many multimedia applications and games that took advantage of MMX performed better, had higher frame rates, etc. MMX was not the only improvement on the Pentium MMX. The dual 8K caches of the Pentium were doubled to 16 KB each. It also had improved dynamic branch prediction, a pipelined FPU, and an additional instruction pipe to allow faster instruction processing. With these and other improvements, the Pentium line of processor was extended even longer. The line lasted up until recently, and went up to 233 MHz. While new PCs with this processor are all but non-existent, there are many older PCs still using this processor and going strong. |
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