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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
ezst036 The Wikipedia phrasing seems misleading. In today's 2026 software sure MMX probably does not do much. However at the time and for many years, I think MMX was benchmarked on and benchmarked disabled and had been show to produce worthwhile gains. Reply
bit_user ezst036 said: In today's 2026 software sure MMX probably does not do much. However at the time and for many years, I think MMX was benchmarked on and benchmarked disabled and had been show to produce worthwhile gains. The gains of MMX were real, if you had a proper use case for it. These were things like image & video compression, image processing, and signal processing. Probably the most common use case that most people experienced was MMX-accelerated JPEG decoding. It only did integer arithmetic and was limited to just 64-bit vectors, but that still meant you could do 8x 8-bit operations in a single instruction. It also helped reduce register pressure on the general-purpose registers (MMX could use 8 FPU registers and 32-bit x86 CPUs had 8 general-purpose registers). What killed MMX was SSE2, which came with the Pentium 4 (only 3 years later!) and included 128-bit versions of all the MMX instructions (among others). Another advantage it had was getting rid of the limitation MMX had that you couldn't mix integer vector instructions with floating point instructions. After using MMX, you had to flush the FPU state, which was annoying, could have performance implications, and I'm sure caused bugs when people forgot to do it. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/the-end-of-an-era-as-linux-7-5-purges-the-last-30-year-old-intel-mmx-optimizations-from-pentium-age-open-source-os-retires-ancient-1997-pentium-instructions-to-streamline-code#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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- The end of an era as Linux 7.5 purges the last 30-year-old Intel MMX optimizations from Pentium age
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.