MMX poses questions

Electronic News, Jan 13, 1997 by Andrew MacLellan, Jim DeTar

San Francisco--Intel's formal introduction of the Pentium with multimedia instruction set extensions here last week, dubbed the Pentium with MMX, provided PC OEMs with their first fully multimedia equipped microprocessor but also raised many questions in the minds of some industry observers.

For example, Intel's impending entry into the 3-D graphics accelerator market with partner Real3D, a Lockheed Martin subsidiary, may threaten the very existence of the lower-tier companies that are currently developing 3-D graphics products.

Perhaps more importantly, because there is currently only a limited amount of software capable of fully taking advantage of the added multimedia capabilities of Pentium with MMX, and it provides an estimated performance gain of only 10-20 percent over today's Pentiums at the same operating frequency when running standard non-multimedia applications, some question whether there will initially be significant motivation for consumers to buy systems with the more expensive Pentium with MMX rather than a standard Pentium.

George Perris of Sierra Marketing Group, Rocklin, Calif., commented, "The PC market is saturated and will go into a little slowdown" this year. Mr. Perris said most people buying new PC models today are replacing very old machines, and he does not believe the MMX technology provides enough of an edge to heavily spur replacement of more recently built PCs. "I read no significance into the MMX chip at this time. I don't think anyone will upgrade their PCs just because it is 10 percent faster."

Intel claims, however, that the processor will provide a performance boost of up to 60 percent when running multimedia applications and that will strongly drive the market for the new chips. Albert Yu, Intel senior VP and GM of the Microprocessor Products group, said in an interview with Electronic News that the company realizes there is limited market initially but he expects a rapid acceptance of the new technology.

"We're going to increase the floating-point performance pretty dramatically as we go on to the next generation and higher frequencies," Mr. Yu noted. "So that's how people are thinking about 3-D today. MMX is a piece of it. Floating point is another piece of it. AGP is another piece of it. So if you pull all that together, by the end of this year, we are going to have some really exciting 3-D platforms."

The Pentium with MMX, with some 4.5 million transistors and built on an enhanced version of the same 0.35-micron process used on today's Pentium processors, will initially be offered at internal operating frequencies of 166MHz and 200MHz for desktop systems. As reported previously, Intel is also making the processor available immediately for the portable systems market (EN, Jan. 6) in 150MHz and 166MHz versions.

The 200MHz Pentium with MMX (3.3 volt) is priced at $550, while the 166MHz version (2.8V) is $407. Both are in PGA packaging. The 166MHz version at 2.5V in both TCP and PPGA for notebook systems is $550, while the 150MHz version (2.5V) is $443 in the same package options.

In terms of performance, SPEC CPU95 performance for the 200MHz processor is 6.41 SPECint95 and 4.66 SPECfp95. Performance for the 166MHz processor is 5.59 SPECint95 and 4.3 SPECfp95. The iCOMP Index 2.0 ratings are 182 and 160, respectively.

Key to the technology in Pentium with MMX is a technique called single instruction, multiple data (SIMD). This allows for multiple data streams to be processed with a single instruction, providing parallelism, which Intel said can significantly boost performance for certain applications. The definition of MMX resulted, the company said, from a joint effort between a dedicated group within Intel's 1,000 MPU engineering cadre and outside software development partners.

Mr. Yu said that although 3-D is the most exciting of the applications for MMX right now, the 57 instructions that were added to Pentium to create the MMX extensions were not tailored specifically for 3-D.

"No, they weren't. What we did is look at what happens for multimedia applications, video and things like that. It turns out what they want is one instruction that can execute a whole bunch of data.

"This is a typical SIMD kind of thing. SIMD is not only good for video but also good for 3-D. So what we did was basically implement some of those instructions so one instruction can operate in parallel--a whole bunch of data all at once. So people can use it for 3-D, use it for communications, can use it for some things that people aren't even talking about yet."

OEMs have hailed the revamped technology, but the question of Intel's increasing integration of functionality onto the MPU raises the question of how graphics and 3-D chip companies will fit into the picture.

"MMX will raise the bar for how multimedia functions on the PC," commented Yong Yao, VP of strategic marketing and planning for Trident Microsystems. "Hardware acceleration will continue to push the envelope, and MMX will reshape the workload, in all cases helping companies like Trident."