Cyrix Corp reckons it has now successfully cloned Intel Corp’s MMX multimedia extensions instruction set in its next generation M2 microprocessors, by means of reverse engineering, and it reckons it can have chips with MMX out in the market during the first quarter of next year – the schedule to which Intel has also put itself back on. Cyrix says it increases multimedia performance in its implementation of MMX with a unique Scratch Pad memory feature to improve timing and availability of audio, video or graphics information. It says that by locking down lines of the on-board cache, it created the Scratch Pad for storing time-critical pieces of data. And Cyrix says that by sharing the hardware floating point unit, the MMX implementation required fewer than 20,000 transistors.
