MMX

[Confusednewbie1552]

What's MMX, MMX2, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, etc.? (tell me what all of them are except X 86 and hyper threading).

 

[SneakyStuff]

MMX = Multimedia instruction sets. Everything you listed above are instruction sets.

 

[Confusednewbie1552]

What are the benfits of them?

 

[AndyHui]

MMX, SSE, 3DNow!, etc, are all examples of extensions to the original x86 instruction set that deal with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD).

They speed certain operations where you can pack together a number of similar operations and do them at once, ie you want to multiply 4 different numbers by 6 or something like that. These instructions tend to be fairly common with multimedia and graphics.

MMX caters for integer operations, while SSE, SSE2, SSE3 and 3DNow! are floating point operations.

 

[Goi]

Then there's 3DNow!, 3DNow Pro and 1 other 3DNow! that I've forgotten