INTEL MMX™ TECHNOLOGY

The Intel MMX™ technology comprises a set of instructions to the Intel architecture (IA) that are designed to greatly enhance the performance of advanced media and communications applications. These extensions (which include new registers, data types and instructions) are combined with the Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) Execution model to accelerate the performance of applications such as motion video, combined graphics with video, image processing, audio synthesis, speech synthesis and compression, 2D and 3D graphics, which typically use compute-intensive algorithms to accomplish the purpose. All existing soft wares that don’t make use of this technology will also run on the processor without modification. Presented below is an elementary treatise on this technology in a programmer’s point of view.  

Overview of the MMX™ Technology Programming Environment     

MMX™ technology provides the following new extensions to the Intel Architecture (IA) programming environment. 

• Eight MMX™ registers (MM0 to MM7).

• Four MMX™ data types 

• The MMX ™ instruction set