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[ Go to June 1997 Table of Contents ]
How To Buy
Although Intel's MMX-enabled Pentium processor provides automatic performance enhancements, your MMX PC will work best when used with applications optimized to take advantage of the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) process. SIMD allows one instruction to perform the same function on multiple pieces of data. Software optimized for MMX can provide speed enhancements of 60 percent or more, compared to software that isn't enhanced for MMX. Unfortunately, MMX-enabled titles remain rare. Most of the titles available fall into two categories: games and photo/image processing. The image utilities include Easy Photo, Adobe PhotoDeluxe, Microsoft Picture It and Picture Man 3.0 Pro. Other titles include Visual Home Deluxe (a home design program), XG Soft Synthesizer (a music authoring and editing program), Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water (a biography of the architect), The Ultimate Human Body 2.0 (an encyclopedia of the human body) and Timetables of Technology (an overview of the history of technology) You'll have to wait for hard-core business applications, though. Hardware manufacturers speculate that MMX-enabled titles will become common near the end of the year.
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