MMX to speed current crop

Dell and Toshiba will be demonstrating MMX technologies at Comdex that boost performance on their product lineups.

Brooke Crothers Former CNET contributor

Brooke Crothers writes about mobile computer systems, including laptops, tablets, smartphones: how they define the computing experience and the hardware that makes them tick. He has served as an editor at large at CNET News and a contributing reporter to The New York Times' Bits and Technology sections. His interest in things small began when living in Tokyo in a very small apartment for a very long time.

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Brooke Crothers

Nov. 8, 1996 1:15 p.m. PT

2 min read

Dell Computer (DELL) and Toshiba will be demonstrating MMX technologies at Comdex that boost performance on current product offerings.

Intel's MMX processors, slated to ship in the first quarter of next year, increase performance for multimedia applications written to take advantage its capabilites. Specifically, 2D and 3D graphics, speech recognition, audio, and video compression applications will see better performance compared to current Intel processors.

Dell will be showing customers its OptiPlex PCs with MMX technology. The OptiPlex line is targeted at businesses. Dell wants to show large corporate customers the benefits of MMX at Comdex, a source said.

Moreover, Dell will "be very quick" to bring out MMX technology-based systems on both its OptiPlex and Dimension lines when MMX processors begin shipping in volume in the first part of 1997, a source said.

Toshiba will demonstrate videoconferencing on an MMX-enabled Tecra notebook PC so "we can show the full capabilities of videoconferencing," a Toshiba spokesperson said. The notebook will not be demonstrated on the floor, the spokesperson added.

AST will demo Advantage multimedia PCs using MMX-enabled processors. AST will also demonstrate enhanced Ascentia notebooks using MMX processors.

Intel simulations indicate that certain types of multimedia and communications software will run from 50 percent to 400 percent faster when developers write to MMX.

Moreover, MMX Pentium processors are expected to deliver a general "baseline" performance improvement of between 10 and 15 percent compared with current Pentiums because the size of the built-in cache has been doubled and enhancements have been made to the data paths, known as "pipelines," inside the processor.