Bigeye #7: Pentium MMX on Windows 95B

Created on May 24, 2020
Indexed on August 26, 2022 at 05:23 PM

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Welcome to the future! Some people thought Intel would force everyone to adopt the Pentium Pro eventually, but that just didn't work out. Instead, consumers were given a sort of "Pentium 1.5" at the start of 1997, which included the new MMX instruction set.

Rather than having a beefy on-package cache to boost existing programs, the Pentium MMX looked to the future with its new instruction set. Developers had to optimize their programs to make use of the new instructions, which could all the CPU to shred a classic Pentium of equal clocking.

Quake does not make use of MMX instructions, at least unless you use a later source port. It wouldn't be until later in 1997 that MMX-optimized programs would start showing up. Still, the doubled L1 cache here can provide a slight performance boost for legacy software.

The Tseng Labs ET6000 is worth noting, as it is one of the fastest video cards for a Pentium 1 system. Actually, there are plenty of faster ones out there, but since USWC is not supported on this video card nor any platform prior to the Pentium Pro, the ET6000 is an excellent pairing with a Pentium MMX.

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