What is MMX Technology & Why Was it Flawed?

MMX Technology sounds like a distant memory, and indeed it is. But it’s actually still with us today – it has to be, to remain compatible with older software, something the x86 line tends to do, although not always completely successfully anymore. But the MMX story is an interesting one. MMX was kind of an improvement to numeric co-processors, and as Pentium’s all had a numeric co-processor, any advancement needed to bring something new. In this case it was Multi-Media Xtensions – although Intel will swear blind this isn’t what it stands for. MMX was a set of instructions which allowed the Pentium CPU to perform multimedia based commands quicker and more efficiently. However it also had it’s early problems. So let’s see what they were and explore the world of MMX.