Some consumer and business software vendors are now using MMX to improve the performance of their products.
Though much of the high-profile, flashy software written for MMX so far has been game-and entertainment-oriented, some consumer and business software vendors are now using MMX to improve the performance of their software products.
But don't expect to see dramatic across-the-board performance gains, since the new processor only speeds certain types of operations, and not all kinds of software can take advantage of the gains, according to software developers.
How much users benefit from MMX will depend on what applications they use, though it still makes sense to buy MMX systems, said Dean McCarron, a principal at Mercury Research, a Scottsdale, Arizona-based marketing research firm.
While gains of 300-400% are being reported in some operations, it's not the entire application that is running so fast, he said. At the other end of the scale, some operations might only see a 10% speed improvement. McCarron also sees competition ahead for Intel, with competitors such as AMD and Cyrix offering MMX compatible chips as early as the next quarter.
Nevertheless, the bottom line is that "both the Pentium MMX processor and the [upcoming] MMX P6 [Klamath ] significantly outperform previous versions [of these chips]," said McCarron.
To take the pulse of how software vendors view the chip's performance and ability, CNET interviewed several major developers. (Intel is an investor in CNET: The Computer Network.)
Adobe claims a 30 to 500 percent speed increase among operations handled by the new MMX features. "It definitely brings a new generation of performance to the product," said Brian Lamkin, director of graphics products for the company.
Some operations, however, will not see any improvement, Lamkin said. These include third-party plug-ins popular with many Photoshop users. For those to speed up, the plug-in developers will also need to revise their code to make it MMX-compatible. Also, Adobe has chosen not to utilize MMX technology in its Illustrator drawing software, as it believed that MMX is not really suited to the vector operations Illustrator primarily uses.
Overall, Microsoft has seen a performance improvement of about 30 percent using the MMX processor relative to plain vanilla "classic" Pentiums. "Since our goal is to make it as easy as possible for consumers to work with images, we're excited about this technology," said Kirsty Ellison, product manager for Picture It.
But much of the speed improvement in this case comes from the MMX processor's larger on-board cache memory, not the pure MMX technology, according to Lee--the pure MMX technology being the new instructions which Intel has added to the Pentium processor's instruction set.
Although Macromedia was one of the first to support MMX, like Adobe they will only add it to those products where they feel it will provide significant performance gains. They have no intention of adding it to some software, like their HTML editor BackStage, where there would be little benefit.
"MMX enables content creators to produce much richer content with Live3D," said Lea Lucente, Netscape's Live3D evangelist. At this point, the Live3D plug-in is the only component of Netscape's Web browsing software that employs MMX technology.
MMX technology will also be used by some major computer hardware manufacturers to aid in the introduction of new types of software products. Motorola has made its new software modem products MMX-enabled.
Intel, not surprisingly, is also promoting products based on the chip's new features. Intel will be heavily promoting the Intel Video Phone. The product allows users to videoconference over regular phone lines and is sold through PC OEMs package with MMX technology-based PC systems.
Without MMX, the videophone averages only about 12 to 15 frames per second, but on MMX systems the frame rate runs anywhere from the high teens to over 25 frames per second, according to Michael Glancy, general manager of Intel's OEM communications products group.
The performance enhancement comes from recoding of the software to use MMX technology and from the basic hardware improvements to the MMX chip itself, such as the larger cache. "MMX allows us to draw even more functionality of what was in external hardware into the MMX-enabled Pentium processor," according to Glancy. In addition to the videophone, which is currently available, Intel is currently developing a software-based modem, much like Motorola's initiative.
Glancy feels that MMX technology will have major implications for both software and hardware beyond such immediate uses as videoconferencing and software modems. "This is a major turning point in applications for the PC. With a very high rate of MIPS (millions of instructions per second), you're going to be seeing an increasing number of real-time applications."