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Technology Stocks : CYRIX / NSM

NSM 18.27

0.0%

Jul 31 5:00 PM EST

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To: Chuca Marsh who wrote (5708)	1/2/1997 5:05:00 PM
From: Steve Porter	of 33344

Charles, I think you made a wise decision, but I would hope you made it on your own initiative and not merely the impact of an MMX flaw on a single game. I think Intel's MMX may end up doing more good for Cyrix and AMD that Intel until they can get that cycle penalty down to something more normal (i.e. 5-10 cycles tops). People will simply not want MMX software if they are going to have to pay a large penalty in performance to use it. I mean let's face it, most things that would use the MMX unit are also fairly reliant on the FPU (Floating Point Unit). This is not a good mix on the Intel chip. AMD will definitely benefit from this "mistake" (call it what you will) of Intel's, as they are supposed to be ramping their MMX chip (the K6) soon. It will be interesting to see what both AMD and Cyrix offer in the way of perfect compatibility with MMX. Both Nexgen (now part of AMD and mostly responsible for the K6) and Cyrix were working on a different way to get to the same goal (a multimedia instruction set). All were proprietory and then Intel came out with a "MMX" spec. AMD licensed MMX technology which means they should do a good job. Cyrix's implementation is the big question. Obviously AMD abandonded their version of an MMX technology to use Intel's (down to the last transistor). They may have in doing so abondoned so performance advantages they might have gained by mixing the two technologies (making it look the same to programs, but do the calculations differently). If Cyrix can do something of a hybrid like mentioned above, their MMX unit maybe faster than either Intel's of AMD's which would be a big boost. It also may not be. Only time (or an indpendent benchmark) will answer that quetion. Steve

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