Inside Track

John C. Dvorak

The Big Switcheroo Dept.: There's been a lot of talk about the new multimedia extensions (MMX) to be added to the Intel P55C Pentium chip. What everyone is not telling you is that all the Pentiums may well incorporate the MMX circuitry by the end of the year. These are not trivial changes, according to an anonymous phone call I received regarding the new chips. Take what I'm about to tell you as unconfirmed--but highly likely--rumor, not fact.

MMX is Intel's latest scheme to pull the rug out from under the competition. Although it did recently license the MMX instruction set to AMD, I believe this was a slap at Cyrix, which was arrogantly hoping to popularize its own multimedia code. MMX will be the standard, period.

The MMX extensions will at minimum allow for full-screen 640-by-480, 16-million-color, 30-frame-per-second video without MPEG compression. This is raw processing. It also has room for a simultaneous 44-MHz digital audio channel. If all this is accurate, MMX will revolutionize multimedia and could even jeopardize the future of graphics and video add-ons such as accelerator cards and dedicated MPEG-II chips for PCs. I'm told some 166-MHz test versions of these chips are floating around.

The instruction set of the chip was given to developers in March. It's believed that when the chip becomes official, 200 MHz will be the clock speed of the low-end version. There is some confusion regarding this, since I doubt Intel is going to discontinue the 100-, 133-, and 166-MHz Pentium CPUs, and supposedly the company is going to slipstream the MMX circuitry into all Pentiums sometime during the summer. This includes the Pentium Pro. The code name for the Pentium Pro MMX is Klamath, and it's one of Intel's best-kept secrets. (Intel is starting to use code names nowadays instead of numbers. The P7 is the Merced, for example.)

These MMX extensions have been downplayed in the press, because Intel is worried sick that people will stop buying computers and wait for this change. I'd be worried, too, since this upgrade seems more important than floating-point circuitry, especially because it also includes a slew of powerful 3-D instructions. Curiously, industry publications, which may be under nondisclosure agreements on the Intel stratagem, are now doing articles such as "PC Graphics Reach New Level: 3D/PCs Will Become a Compelling Platform for 3D Applications in 1996" (Microprocessor Report, January 22, 1996). Curious timing. And the MMX is never mentioned in the article, though it's touched upon elsewhere. You have to read between the lines nowadays. (Companies use the nondisclosure agreement not to keep secrets away from competitors but to keep information out of the hands of the public. I don't sign them.)

The fallback for people who buy the last of the "old" Pentiums will be an MMX OverDrive chip--it will incorporate a step-down transformer, since the new chips are all 2.9-volt (which allows them to be used in laptops immediately). Intel is going to have to price this OverDrive unit dirt cheap to keep buyers from simply waiting for MMX chips and creating a glut of "old" Pentiums. Expect to see prices lowered at a faster and faster pace as the slipstream change nears.

Now Everything Makes Sense Dept.: If you recall, a lot of weird deals have been made recently. One between Sony and Intel was particularly unusual, because the companies were giddy for no apparent reason. The reason now seems to be this MMX chip. Sony plans to roll out an MMX machine incorporating the new high-capacity DVD disk. It will have the attributes of the most full-blown multimedia machine and will probably have Sony PlayStation characteristics. An MMX machine with a DVD will be the machine to copy next year.

These MMX changes also explain some of the chitchat recently about NSP (native signal processing), which will be done on board the chip rather than with a DSP. Intel has always been embarrassed by the fact that the PowerPC, with its powerful floating point, could do impressive native signal processing far better than any Pentium. In fact, the earlier Intel announcement about NSP was actually a "coded" crypto-comment signaling developers to start thinking along these lines because something is going to change.

So What About the PowerPC? Dept.: As a final aside, I'm told that Adobe Photoshop should run four times faster on an MMX-empowered chip. Currently, Adobe Photoshop runs twice as fast on a PowerPC than on a Pentium running at the same clock speed, thus keeping the Macintosh alive and healthy. The failure of the PowerPC 620 to get launched on time and its reported crummy performance, combined with Intel's aggressiveness, may well turn the Intel-based PC into the graphics community's machine of choice (which it currently is not). This large market is a target of both Intel and Microsoft, and the MMX extensions may finally bring it within their grasp. The PowerPC may be the real target of this entire change. It's a big risk to make a radical change like this, but the results will be increased Intel dominance. Are these guys something, or what?

MMX will be the standard, period. It will revolutionize multimedia and could even jeopardize the future of graphics and video add-ons such as accelerator cards and MPEG-II chips for PCs.

Copyright (c) 1996 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company