<<We just got in a new MMX PC with a 16X speed Cd-Rom. This Cd Rom screams when accessing it for information. I can not believe how fast this Cd Rom is! Oh yeah..it's a 200 MHX Compaq machine!>>
I've heard that the MMX processors don't live up to expectations. They only yield a %20 increase in speed with optimized multimedia applications. This is due to the useage of FPU registers as multimedia registers. The switching between the two takes 50 clock cycles (a very long time when computers are concerned). Because graphics require precision calculations, this switch is very frequent. With the %20 yield in performance, they are about equivalent to Macintoshes with similar processor speeds, and actually outperform Macs by %2 in some rare tasks.
I can't wait till the Macs get the Trimedia (SP?) coprocessors built into every motherboard. This was Apple's answer to MMX, when they first heard about it. The only difference is that the coprocessor will actually give huge performance in multimedia. They'll also be cheap processors for video cards, so we'll get blazing fast performance at prices under $100.
I've heard that Cyrix makes a MMX processor which only takes one clock cycle to switch between MMX and FPU instruction sets. I bet this processor lives up to expectations.
