🚀 go-pugleaf

Dean H. Saxe (Remove asterisks in address to reply) (dean@cerevisiae.biology.emory.edu) wrote:
> In article <33661F8A.8E8D5A82@prism.gatech.edu>, gt5879c@prism.gatech.edu wrote:

> > Does anyboy kow if it is true that Intel has dropped prices of pentium
> > CPU's by 48%?  I read this in the paper.  It was supposed to have
> > happened Monday (28th).  I haven't seen any evidence at any online
> > computer stores yet.  If anybody knows for sure, please let me know.
> > -Chris Eaker

> Its true.  They are pushing their Pentium chips with MMX. Don't believe the
> hype, however, they are only a few percent faster than the standard Pentium
> and only faster on certain tasks.  See
> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/main3.html

And actually, for a lot of things, MMX might be slower.  The floating
point registers are used for MMX to, and it has to do some kind of
context switch to go from MMX to floating point and vice versa.  I
believe the numbers I saw were that it takes about 50 cycles to make
this switch in one direction, and 35 cycles in the other direction.
In addition, if the software you are using does not explicitly take
advantage of the MMX instructions, there is *no* difference between
using an MMX chip and a non-MMX Pentium (except the price you pay for
it of course).  If you are running Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc then there
is probably no point to buying an MMX chip at the present time.  I would
suspect there will be a lot of programs that use MMX for Windows 95 soon,
I am not sure about Windows NT.

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