PENT MMX

9/5/98

Pentium MMX: The Pentium MMX was released in January of 1997 as a 166MHz and 200MHz part. A 233MHz part followed as did 200-233MHz "Mobile" versions (Codeword "Tillamook"). The normal versions use the conventional 296 pin PGA. The mobile versions use a 320pin tape carrier package. The mobile versions have 64GigaBytes of memory space vs 4GB for the conventional CPU.

The major feature of the MMX Pentium was the addition of a set of instructions for vector processing of small integer arrays of various sizes, however other changes appear to have been made as the CPU appears to be about 20% faster than non-MMX Pentiums of the same clock speed for non-MMX applications. Presumably the parallel processing capabilities of the CPU were enhanced. A 200MHx Pentium MMX should test at about 400MIPS. (Intel seems to have misplaced the performance data on their web site. I was unable to determine their exact claims).