Does anyone use MMX anymore?

[chrstrbrts]

Hello,

Given your experience with programming nowadays, would you say that people still use MMX instructions?

Or, have people abandoned MMX for SSE and AVX instructions?

EDIT:

Now that I think about, why would anyone still use MMX instructions when you have to worry about mucking up the FPU when switching back and forth between vector manipulations and floating point arithmetic?

Wouldn't everyone, assuming they have the right processor technology, just use SSE or AVX?

 

[Cogman]

You've got it right.

MMX is pretty much unused now because SSE supplanted it in pretty much every way. SSE1 covered many of the useful parts of MMX, it was released with the P3
SSE2 covered all of what MMX did, it was part of the P4.

So the period of time where MMX was useful spans from the period of its introduction (1997) to roughly the P4 period (2001). There is no reason to use the MMX instructions now a days. If you purchased your computer in the past 15 years, your good. I can't think of a single good reason to use MMX instructions. Both SSE and MMX will be handled by the same FPU, so you really won't get any benefits when it comes to processing speed by intermixing them. Pretty much the only thing that might be useful is if you are trying to hold a ton of data in registers at once, but that is somewhat silly as that is going to be counter to most of the goals of SSE instructions.

 

[chrstrbrts]

You've got it right.

MMX is pretty much unused now because SSE supplanted it in pretty much every way. SSE1 covered many of the useful parts of MMX, it was released with the P3
SSE2 covered all of what MMX did, it was part of the P4.

So the period of time where MMX was useful spans from the period of its introduction (1997) to roughly the P4 period (2001). There is no reason to use the MMX instructions now a days. If you purchased your computer in the past 15 years, your good. I can't think of a single good reason to use MMX instructions. Both SSE and MMX will be handled by the same FPU, so you really won't get any benefits when it comes to processing speed by intermixing them. Pretty much the only thing that might be useful is if you are trying to hold a ton of data in registers at once, but that is somewhat silly as that is going to be counter to most of the goals of SSE instructions.

Thanks.