What is MMX Technology & Why Was it Flawed? [Byte Size] | Nostalgia Nerd
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- čas přidán 14. 06. 2016
- PCs in the late 90s would most likely have been blessed with the terms MMX Processors. Pentium MMX, Pentium II MMX. For in 1997, Intel's MMX technology was all the rage, and the latest processor technology. If you didn't have an Intel processor with MMX extensions (or a Cyrix or AMD who quickly jumped on the wagon, much to Intel's displeasure) then you were about to fall behind the crowd, especially in terms of this new multimedia thing. CD-ROM based software needed some extra grunt and the source of this, according to Intel, would come from 57 new extensions encoded into their latest range of chips. However, in some cases it came at a cost to performance. Find out what that cost was and how MMX developed into something more useful with the Pentium II range of CPUs.
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Program at 3:00 is Children's BBC classic, Bertha
Game at 4:10 is Pod. A racing game for the PC from 1997.
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Information courtesy of "The Complete PC Upgrade & Maintenance Guide, Ninth Edition" by Mark Minasi.
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CPU commercials from 90... Do we have cpu commercials now? I don't recall any.
I cringe when I see those commercials
Intel still does crappy, misleading "Intel Core i7" commercials.
We had some with Sheldon Cooper like a year or so ago.
The one with Homer Simpson with an Intel chip implanted in his head is the best.
Found msis ad
I am old and crusty and I remember people joking that MMX stood for "Much More eXpensive"
The 64-bit MMX registers were overlaid on the 64-bit mantissa of the corresponding 80-bit FPU registers. This scheme was primarily chosen in order to make MMX compatible with MMX-unaware operating system kernels as it avoided the need to save any new registers on the machine stack during task switches. It had little to do with "enough room" (chip area).
It was possible to mix MMX and FPU code, although cumbersome, due to the fact that FPU registers are relatively addressed (a stack structure) while MMX registers are directly addressed. The Pentium II had the same limitations as the Pentium MMX in this regard.
(SSE then introduced a new separate register bank, making it much easier to mix SSE with FPU code, or even MMX code).
Yes, Intel really screwed up on their FPU and MMX stack design.
They can't trash them since so many programs use FPU. MMX can be trashed, I think.
Aren't MMX instructions a ALU only thing, and SSE/AVX a FPU only thing ?
^Based on that, I think MMX went nowhere because ALU's aren't really that useful in post DOS era.
On the other hand, AMD's 3D Extension (3D Now!), was GREAT (it was used to accelerate FPU SIMD operations).
Intel's SSE intruction set was based on the same principles as 3DNow!, and was highly successful as well (you need SSE2 to run STEAM client).
Back to ALU's tho :
Doing things in parallel for them is getting us nowhere today as well (at least on x86-64 code). AMD learned this the hard way when they made Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller architectures that double ALU resources, but share FPU resources.
In short : If FX-8350 was better than Intel Core i7, we can safely asume program uses parallel code for ALU units/"cores".
Compatibility Madness
"Aren't MMX instructions a ALU only thing, and SSE/AVX a FPU only thing ?"
==MMX instructions work on integers of size 8 bit, 16, 32, 64. I don't know where exactly on the chip the circuits are located, but they use the FPU registers.
MMX is useful in some limited cases like audio processing.
I used it to do text searches. I can compare 8 char in parallel rather than 1 at a time.
Yes, SSE only deals with 32 bit floats.
I think it is SSE2 that adds 64 bit support.
The good thing is that they have their own registers. This means you can submit a SSE instruction and FPU (or MMX) one after the other and there is no pipeline stall since they don't share anything.
When you want to do FPU and MMX, you are screwed.
+louis tournas
"Do FPU" = x87 and "do MMX" = SIMD ALU instructions :)
But you were right, MMX utilises FPU's registers to make ALU ops faster (it was done this way to avoid problems with context switching in OS).
I don't think "x87" instruction set is use anymore... (SSE FTW ;)).
So, doing MMX op with x87 op is in the past (or in Really Old programs).
PS. "SSE2, introduced with the Pentium 4, further extended the x86 SIMD instruction set with integer (8/16/32 bit) and double-precision floating-point data support for the XMM register file. SSE2 also allowed the MMX opcodes to use XMM register operands, but ended this support with SSE4 (and recently with SSE4.2, introduced in the Core microarchitecture).[citation needed] However, since processor support for any SSE revision also implies support for MMX, the removal does not limit the data types usable by x86 SIMD."
Source - Wikipedia :)
Compatibility Madness
"I don't think "x87" instruction set is use anymore... (SSE FTW ;))."
==That's something that depends on the compiler.
Since I compile with VC++6, and I have chosen Pentium pro instruction set, it generates x87 code when I use floats.
If I want to use MMX or SSE, I use the __asm key thing for inline assembly code inside my C++ code.
I don't know what VC++ 2017 does.
I love how every processor sold today still contains MMX.
I was just talking with my boss about that,.. even my Ryzen 9 5900 has MMX(+)... whatever the (+) is...
I feel its somehow too bright or something with new computers, maybe mmx doesnt properly work with ultra fast cpu. Also 2d speed was reduced with patch in win10.
now i need that MMX inside sticker on my PC
@@Nobody-Nowhere yes. Coz you know, your CPU is like a Pentium MMX... only BETTER.
@@DxBang3D "MMX+", a.k.a. MMXEXT, is an unofficial name for a sub-set of SSE. Note that SSE contains both, integer instructions and floating-point instructions, whereas MMX was integer-only. The "integer" part of SSE is pretty much an extension to MMX. In some of their older processors, AMD adopted the "integer" part of Intel's SSE, but *not* the full SSE. Programmers therefore referred to this sub-set of SSE, which was available on AMD processors, as "MMXEXT". Later AMD processors support full SSE, of course.
good god Intel's marketing was awesome back then.
Remember the Blue Man Group commercials for Pentium 3?
I wonder when Intel decided they didn't need to make commercials anymore? Probably when "upgrading your computer" stopped being something someone wants to (or can even) do.
joseph + not owned a pc for a while i guess
The Stoned Raider Back then they had over the top animations and exciting visuals but now theyve got pseudo-intelectuals like Jim Parsons annoying people with fingerprint scanning technology. I would've gotten my 4690k a hell of a lot faster if it had singing and dancing capacitors advertising it instead of Sheldon "bundle of sticks" cooper.
Golden Grenadier and now we have stone raider memes
when is a joke a meme and a meme just a bloody joke...
I remember before MMX came out, reading about it getting all excited that the CPU is going to be better, games would run better without the need for better graphics cards. That was the big thing I remember actually, the whole idea of getting better graphics without the need for a video card. The racing game you see at around 4:10 was supposedly ran without a video card which was supposed show off the power of these new instructions. At the time video cards were called 3d accelerators or something like that, but the point was that they weren't looked at as vital components to a computer, an extra booster type thing to have, which is why I think Pentium felt the need to include 3d acceleration to their processors with MMX. Maybe they saw 3d cards as a thing that happened because they dropped the ball with graphics and this was their way of getting in the game. But history showed that 3d accelators where here to stay and I think they didn't bother with being the "graphics" processor and let the gpu people do that.
My Electronics teacher used to be SOOOO hyped about the MMX. He fell hook, line and sinker for the "running multimedia software with no video card or sound card" hype. Then Pod came out, and proved that the 3DFX card actually worked to make games look better and run smoother, while the MMX processors could at most make a game a couple FPS faster due to their larger cache.
I had to develop a buffer rotation library in IA-32 with SIMD instructions. I wrote several versions of each, from plain (we had to support very old processors) passing through MMX up to SSSE3.
The MMX version was the slowest of them all and required a lot more additional code to make it work properly (it absolutely needs the FP unit flushed before and after use). That was the same result I had when, later on, I had to build a 16 bits grayscale image normalization library.
I remember that weezer video that came with Windows...
As well as some Alice in Chains.
An awesome song and an awesome video!
it came with guitar hero for ds
Heck yeah when my buddy got a new Packard Bell I was equally amused and confused.
@@rat4spd I don't know about Alice in Chains but Edie Brickell's Good Times did.
I never imagined back in the 90s that MMX would become the subject of an enjoyable infotainment video 20-odd years later. It did have a use after all!
My Cyrix 333 had it. My 2500 had it. Now my 6600 has it. I don't think I've ever had an app that's used it.
Actually my P3 1.7 had it and 2 P4s, one at 3ghz and one at 3.2ghz.
Jesus, also a dual core celeron in a lappie, think it was at 1.6ghz.
I've had a lot of CPUs in my time.
Take of those early mmx CPUs were incredible in terms of overhead. My P166mmx ran happily at 287MHz. % wise that is the best over clock I have ever had by miles.
That's a 72% overclock, you're right that's a real good effort.
Daz555Daz damn son that’s some gains getting p2 speeds
YES. I was building PCs at the time. I had an Evergreen P200mmx proc that Never blinked at 300mhz. That's the fastest the board will go. I still have it paired with my PCI VooDoo 3 3000 card. Have not ran it in almost 10 years. Im sure it all still works. assuming the Caps on the mobo are fine.
I did the same with mine. Apparently the 200mhz and 166 were the same chip. I ran mine for years at 233 with stock cooling.
Can you do something on the failure of quadrangle graphics cards sometime dude?
Absolutely. Good topic. I love a bit of quadratic texturing.
Like the Diamond Edge 3D that supported 6 Sega Saturn games? Yeah, we all know how well that turned out! I do cherish my beloved Saturn!
Michael Duke
That's the one!
LGR did an Oddware video about that card. Come to think of it, Nostalgia Nerd reminds me a lot of LGR. By the way guys, I love both of your channels!
I took some 3D modeling and animation courses in college. They really stressed using 3 point polygons. Any surface with more than 3 points can cause surface radicals (clipping and distortions).
I remember learning about this in my Computer Hardware course about a decade ago...and then immediately forgetting it. Can't forget the marketing though. God damn did they ever boast that feature.
you know your current pc's cpu has mmx tech inside it🤣🤣
MMX was not flawed, just misunderstood. Intel marketed it as a "media extension" whereas in reality, it is simply a more efficient method of performing integer math, and because it provided wide 64bit registers it is also very useful for high-performance memory copies where DMA could not be used. All modern memcpy implementations take advantage of SMID instructions where possible as it allows you to perform bulk memory copies far faster and in parallel. Even today MMX is still valid and is used depending on the task at hand. In fact, it was so successful and useful that it was later enhanced through the addition of SSE, SSE2, AVX and now AVX2 extensions that all operate using the same ideas and concepts.
OpenGL's programming model requires floating point geometry inputs. MMX can be used for integer geometry processing like mostly integer processing on Sony's PS1.
2:20 how I imagine every semiconductor fabrication plant looks like
We bought a brand new HP Pavilion desktop computer that had this processor. 166Mhz w/ MMX. It was hot stuff back then. Near $2000 for it at Staples in early 1995.
Its not that the Pentium MMX cant run both MMX and FPU programs, it have to clean the pipleine. Its just a 7 or something steep pipline so its not really a issue if the software is well writen.
What really speed it up was AMD 3Dnow added floatingpoints to the SIMD instructions, basicly solving the problem and increasing the speed quite a lot.
Dude i love this! your vids bring back sooooo many memories. Please make more :)
I remember getting a computer for Christmas and it didn't have MMX and the first week of January, they rolled out the new ones with MMX! I took my computer back and exchanged it. I didn't really know what it did, but I knew I had to have it.
Great video man! Thanks! I'll reference it in my pentium mmx computer video if everything goes according to plan this week.
0:37 *VR* *ON* *A* *PENTIUM????*
*SIGN* *ME* *UP*
can the pentium do VR really?
Raven 4096 no
Glitchyyy
you sure I think it can at 480p mind you will get very ill from that low of res but I bet it can do 480p
idk
It should... with a whole mess of external expansion chips that cost more than the computer itself.
Holy crap so much nostalgia from the Pentium ads :O
Heru3005 and the Windows 95 disc Weezer video.
I worked at Best Buy in their it section (before it was offloaded to the geek squad) and I played that all of the time on the computers in a loop on workbench behind the counter. It was revolutionary at the time.
Yup takes me back to when I wanted a PC but the price... Oh the price of them...
My 1st build was an MMX machine.
my very first PC back in 1997 came with MMX 166.
Cyrix Mii 300 which I believe also did 233mhz like the MMX 233 touch faster in some benchies but not all and cheaper, think my dad briefly had an MMX 233.
That racing game is called POD. It's on GOG.
I loved the demo that came with my family's first PC in 1996. An Acer Aspire with a AMD K6 chip.
MMX was actually designed to sell better. Intel was all about marketing and monopoly in late 90s.
I tested several CPUs from that era and it turns out, that Pentium Pro was actually a superior design compared to Pentium II clock per clock running an 200MHz both.
Also there's been a challenge for me to find ANY application that actually did benefit from MMX in Pentum II (Pentium Pro lacks MMX)
After benchmarking in many different apps and games from that era I found out that then considered obsolete Pentium Pro wasn't really obsolete and it did managed to finish almost every task faster than the same clocked Pentium II
The only app I found benefiting from MMX was Lame MP3 encoder which allowed Pentium II to be about 25% faster. Pretty nice boost actually but that was the only app I was able to found.
Well a question that I wanted to have a condensed answer to for such a long time, has been answered.
Good job. :P
there was actually no video about this at all, let alone such a well made one
The cards at 2:49 aren't Intel video boards--they're various SoundBlaster models. :-)
The actual cards he's talking about are the Intel ActionMedia and ActionMedia 2 cards from ~1992 and ISVRPro from ~1994, both of which were i750-based if I recall correctly. The ISVR3 from ~1995 was the dumbed-down video capture board that offloaded compression onto the CPU.
I worked on the video software that shipped with the ISVR series. We never bothered adding MMX support to the software. Oops. ;-)
Hahahaha.
Fascinating. After watching a 5 minute yourube clip, I now actually know what I only thought I knew 20 years ago. ^^
Big love for the Bertha footage!
BeOS took advantage of it. On a P2-400 Win98se would drop frames trying to play one video stream. On the same hardware booted to BeOS it could show 4 different videos at the same time and not drop a frame.
1:40 Between that Weezer video, and the Hover! game, that was my favorite Windows Disk :D
The reason why “MMX” didn’t officially stand for anything was so that it could be trademarked. You can’t trademark meaningful words and phrases, only meaningless ones.
The same thing happened to “DVD”: first it was “Digital Video Disc”, then (once the non-video data applications became more prominent) “Digital Versatile Disc”, then it stood for nothing at all.
I'm loving your videos because I love the "classic" pc era, 80s and 90s, from xt to pentium 1 and 2, that's "my thing", sometimes when people ask me for advice on building their systems I jokingly say "oh, get a socket 7 motherboard for your processor, a pci graphics card, it's better than local bus, you'd want 66mhz or 100mhz front side bus, DIMM for ram, simm is too slow, get an isa sound blaster 16 for sound, and add a 3dfx accelerator" hehehehe.
after the pentium 3 and 4 I kinda lost track of models, numbers, it's confusing, I'm like "so... dual core is not the same as core 2 duo, right?, wich one is 886/pentium 5?, is core i3 986 and core i5 1086 or are they the same generation? and core i7? is it pentium 6, 7 or 8?" hahaha.
Pelger what are you smoking?
HAHAHA. It's been a long time since I've seen the Intel Clean Room Rave commercial. That was a good commercial.
I just found this channel...and I fucking love it. This is some great content.
Thank you for the video!
lol@that Intel advert. That was brilliant. Haven't seen an actual Intel advert in years. No doubt it won't be as good as this one.
I'd love to see something on the transputer technology. What happened to it and where did it go?
The thing that most stood out about MMX/SIMD was how it flew in the face of the RISC paradigm. RISC was supposed to produce faster CPU chips by reducing the complexity of the instruction set, so more complex calculations that required multiple CPU cycles would be more than made up by the much faster clock speeds that RISC was supposed to allow. Except RISC _failed_ to get any faster than less expensive CISC processors like the Pentium. Some fanbois may try to argue that Pentiums "have a RISC core" or some other nonsense like that. That's kind of like saying that a high level programming language is really assembler "because it compiles to machine code". The fact remains that the architecture with the increasing number and kinds of instructions won the race.
> can't use matrix math and floating point at the same time
Good job Intel. What's next, a TV that can only do audio *or* video, not both?
(Yes you could switch back and forth but the performance penalty basically would defeat the point.)
It's more about providing speedup for parallelisable integer code. Eg. audio or video compression and decompression, image manipulation, etc. Rather than say having multiple audio channels running at once. Although the speedup could have perhaps enabled you to say mix more audio channels in to one. Neither is it about being able to do different things at once, normal thread swapping is for that.
Wow! This is clearly the tech of the future! I cant wait to see it!!
I learned it stood for Matrix Math eXtension
At the time, the silicon budget didn't allow manufacturers to build SIMD floating point units. And as most games made use of fixed point arithmetic, MMX as it was designed was enough. Naturally, the next step was to improve SIMD to support floating point, which happened when SSE was developed. And since then, the amount of parallelism and precision in the SIMD units has been improving (AVX). The same in GPUs. By the way, the major improvement (compared to the P-Pro CPU) in the P2 CPU was out-of-order execution in both 16 and 32 bit code.
CK, very interesting historical note, thank you.
0x5F3759DF says it all
LOL@ 2:19 Taking me back! I still have a stuffed Intel "Bunny Suit" toy from back in the day. If I recall, I got it from an Intel Rep who paid a visit to our company.
Is the video about math coprocessors removed or hidden? I even went back and looked manually through all your videos from around the time this one came out and didn't see it.
At that time, for the average game players; THE BIGGEST dif between the a p200 and p233mmx was the game "Need For Speed". When using MMX, the game play was twice as fast, making for a stunning game. I even remember the intro menu sliding-in like is was on ice compared to the jerky presentation of non-mmx. Later I presumed it was the early start of SSE, 2 and 3 etc.
Can the AMD K6-II with 3DNow technology be compared to Intel MMX technology?
You squeezed Bertha in!
loved that show as a kid!
Serious nostalgia trigger!
I remember the first computer I got had MMX plastered all over the case, box, and instruction manual and even had that game at 4:10 included.
This M&Ms thing is awesome. I need to get some.
Maybe MMX came out in the 90s and the "X" stood for XTREME.
MMX wasn't "flawed", it was a solution for a very real problem in the early age of "advanced" CPU's. But like just about everything else back then, it wasn't perfect. But that was the wonderful World of Computers from the late 80's - early 00's. What a time to be a computer geek :--)
What's the car game clip you added please? I played it back in the day on my 200Mhz PC and would love to play it again
I might be wrong, but it looked like POD to me.
That's the one. Cheers
I would have thought the MMX instructions would firstly mainly be there for backwards comparability having being superceded, and secondly have been absorbed into a greater instruction set and the fabric of the standard CPU?
The MMX / FPU switch was annoying with the early chips but with a bit of rescheduling you could split procedures into MMX and FPU parts, each processing a large block of data, the 200ish cycles switch is not so bad now .. You could do non MMX or FPU instructions while the switch happened in the background. Uses extra memory reads and writes but once the block is in cache it's accessed quickly enough... Worked well for an assembler vector graphics shape filling routine with alphablend..... It all got much better with out of order instruction + memory access rescheduling and MMX/SSE, IntegerPU and FPU running separately in parallel. Could alphablend using the main instructions, MMX and FPU irogether by interleaving the integer, FPU and MMX instructions and pairing MMX instructions... I'm pretty sure I reached max possible speed.. Several times faster than using the main CPU or FPU on its own... At the time, sending odd jobs in no particular order to the GPU was severely bottlenecked so not worth it for UI stuff, same even today to a certain extent..
How did that work in a multitasking OS? Did you need critical sections or did the OS come in and make you pay for expensive context switches?
@@SerBallister .. Task switches did not seem to happen during the execution of a tight inner loop (say less than 20 instructions per each of a million pixels or so per frame) as individual frame creation times did not vary.when tested. The switch from MMX to FPU and back could be mitigated so it had little speed impact, but it was a pain when coding. In the x86 days, before x64 and even MMX, there were so few registers,and pushes and pops were not as fast, it was faster for some routines to alter code on the fly (very naughty, bad practice now-a-days). This was despite having to run Windows VirtualProtect op to turn the section of code memory writable and then back to read-only for execution. Saving a couple of registers could make a lot of difference in tight loops.
It would be more interesting to see real usage statistics, how wide that "mmx" really used, and how much it really helped.
SIMD does not require any form of parallelism to still be SIMD. Basically, with MIMD every time you wanted to add something to a value in memory, you had to load the instruction each time, even if the data was vectored (in series). With SIMD you can issue an instruction that says "Add 2 to all the values from here to here in memory", thus one instruction that repeats over a series of data. Cray pioneered this system with their second or third super computer way back in the late 1970's/early1980's. (I think it was called the Cray MX). Just food for thought.
On a pipelined processor, the only major reason to introduce SIMD is in order to add instruction level explicit parallelism, because pipelining hides the instruction loading and decoding impact in the common case already, as long as the data is independent of one another.
But also consider that pipelining is a form of implicit parallelism, as multiple instructions are in flight at the same time: one instruction is at the decoding stage while another is at the ALU stage while others can be at register reading or writing stages. This way serialization of basic CPU units is reduced.
This in turn means, that sequential SIMD on a non-pipelined processor is poor man's substitute for increased parallelism of a pipelined processor. Food for thought, huh.
didn't AVX replace MMX then or did Intel keep MMX in case of anyone still using it in newer applications or wanting to run older applications that use MMX instead of AVX, AVX2, or AVX-512?
Do any modern applications still use the MMX instruction set?
Yes, where it makes sense to do so, I have often used it in code that performs audio processing (DSP) for projects such as Kodi.
Microsoft Publisher was the only title which was available at the book store and optimized for MMX when I checked back in 1998 or 1999 :)
You had the ... how intel and AMD made media comoute faster.
Please do a dedicated 3Dnow! video regarding AMD & Cyrix chips.
I remember that people used to confuse MMX with MSX. My computer was MSX technology :(.
biscoito1r LOL
its so cool that you were playing buddy holly
That video came on the Windows 95 install CD - to demonstrate the amazing power of Windows Media Player. ;) As a young computer nerd, that was literally my introduction to Weezer.
Ironically, the 6x86MX can execute MMX and FPU instructions at the same time.
The good old days, when I was running a Celeron 333 over clocked to 900 MHz. Can't overclock that much anymore.
yep I remember the Celeron 300A that was an easy OC chip
My 5950X has a base speed of 3.4GHz and can overclock to 5.025GHz... it's still possible :)
I have a few of those 233Mhz MMX Pentium chips just sitting in a box
They were very popular and were followed by the Pentium II release :o
that damn buddy holly video was playing all the time on computers at best buy in the nineties when I sold these things.
I would like to know more about SSE, SSE2 and 3Dnow.
MMX was actually Intel’s second attempt to include DSP-type functionality into their CPUs. The earlier one was called “NSP” (“Native Signal Processing”). They abandoned that effort under pressure from Microsoft--not sure why...
Intel i860 has SIMD, the "floating-point or graphics" instructions use a register file that can be accessed by the floating point units as either thirty-two 32-bit, sixteen 64-bit, or eight 128-bit floating-point registers, or that can be accessed by the graphics unit as sixteen 64-bit integer registers.
Where is the "previous" episode math co processors?
I remember as a child my parents buying me my first computer and I'd ask each shopkeeper, Does this have MMX?
You sounded so much like LGR during the intro
The MMX chips also have double the L1 cache, which helps.
I can't find the video on numeric co-processors.
I covered it a bit in the sx dx video. But I actually thought I'd done a full coprocessor one.. turns out I just meant to. So, we know what the next one will be!
Omg the thing at 00:39 whats it called? I remember using it as a child on my 98 PC back in the day.
Was it Microsoft Encarta?
A tornado?
I remember the happy days demo on the Windows 95 cd.
MMX = marketing Managers eXcuses :)
So what exactly was the pentium pro?.
Pentium Pro is really the first generation of the Pentium II. The major benefit over the Pentium is that the PPro/P2 dynamically reorders the instructions: if you load a number and it's not in the cache, the PPro/P2 keeps trying to run other instructions downstream until the number finally loads (the original Pentium would just be stuck waiting). This is a pretty big speed boost, but it makes the CPU a lot more complex.
where is the video about numeric co-processors?
Always loved these older cpu's. I remember running benches with the same motherboard (socket 7) and swapping out an P-233MMX with a K6-233 and running benches on them. The K6 would beat the Pentium in integer applications by quite a large margin, but the Pentium would beat the K6 in FPU processes. I think my graphic card back then was either a Riva-128ZX or maybe a Geforce 256. I know later I had the Geforce2 GTS for my AMD T-Bird 1.4ghz. Ah the good old days.
I think the most important thing is the fact that software had to be written to use MMX. It wasn't like it would make everything magically faster. A lot of the hype and marketing was of course misleading.
Nowadays SIMD support is getting a lot better. Automatic vectorization(aka generating SIMD code from scalar code) is seeing wider spread support in languages/compilers and they are getting better at doing it. I still typically find hand written SIMD intrinsics in C/C++ to outperform the compiler's auto-vectorized stuff but writing that code is more time consuming and difficult than scalar code. So getting some performance win automatically is nice and gives a better baseline.
I plan to build PC with Klamath or Deschutes with Voodoo 2 12 MBx2 for some time now.
1:12 modula-2. Coooool
I really enjoy your videos. I thought I'd mention that an abbreviation formed by the first letters of each word in a phrase (e.g. MMX) is called an initialism. When an initialism forms a word (e.g. LASER) it's called an acronym.
2:20 I had to watch this part three times to get what he was saying. Intel's marketing team sure knew what they were doing.
The freebie PC port of the Virtual On Cybertroopers arcade game required MMX processing to be reported from the CPU in order to run, which caused me to be unable to play it on some more powerful CPUs because it wouldn't report MMX processing. Ironically the computer the software came with couldn't run it well either.
My first PC had a 166MHz Pentium MMX, I still have it somewhere.
It was a battle between mmx and amd-k6. Everyone choosed k6 with voodoo fx for gaming.
my first laptop was a 200mhz mmx Pentium :D
4:10 Is that POD? ✌
I'm proud of my i80486/100 PC. I can do unbelievable things (I can emulate Sega Genesis under DOS) without MMX! I limited myself to building a PC that has to be a numbered CPU and not have a name, and the i486/100 is super fast! Now, there is a Cyrix 586 that runs at 133MHz that can allegedly outperform a Pentium 90, and I plan to install that CPU to see if it can speed up my Socket 3 motherboard from 1994. Cache RAM is important though, so I upgraded the 256k to 512k. 1MB is on my bucket list, but it's UNBELIEVABLY expensive to get these parts today!
wait till you see the specs for the AGP x1 socket. you will shit your pants. we still won't be able to run DOOM at fullscreen though =(
I was told it couldn't work. but I got my mmx running win xp. and along with a graphics accelerator card. Xp ran brilliantly. good times
I remember this was a big selling point in the 90s. Oh the 90s a truly edgy time. 😀
Selling points still exist, now with ray tracing
Cool to know I have a 9th gen Intel Core CPU, and it still has MMX on it!
An oversimplified explanation of SIMD is of a teacher instructing his/her students to stand up or sit down. One teacher giving out a single instruction, and multiple students following it.
"Equality in South Africa" Woo-hoo!!! I love seeing one of the proudest moments in my country's history! :-)
What ever happened to DEC digital alpha?
Got killed by stupid HP management after Digital had been bought. HP/Intel pushed
Itanium, aka Titanium, instead. Now Itanium is dead, but Alpha could still be alive. It was and even is a much better architecture than Itanium, being an implementation of VLIW.
whats the song at 1:40??
I had an mmx machine it was pants. I really don't miss 1990's computer tech