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By Al Giovetti





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Intel MMX Technology

MMX achieves faster clock speeds through superpipelining, branch prediction, superscalar execution, and adding 57 new instructions to the architecture. The new instructions speed up loops that have, before now, slowed down most processors to a crawl. It has been determined that the vast majority of slowdowns in processing are caused by these processor intensive loops.

One instruction technique, Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD), enables programs to handle more than one data element simultaneously in a single instruction. This allows sound effects, music, 3-D graphics and internet connections to be handled by the same algorithm and the same instruction set, and where speed is gauged by MIPS (multiple instructions per second), reducing multiple data to one simultaneous instruction speeds things up considerably. This technique allows 24-bit true color to run at 30 frames per second (fps).