Katmai's new instructions

Posted by sengan on Tuesday August 25, 1998 @05:26PM from the 32-bits-aren't-necessary-for-3D dept.

Some new information has emerged about Katmai's new instructions (aka MMX2). Apparently, the details of Clive Turvey's KNI page are essentially correct. Moreover the KNI instructions will allow the use of 4 (versus 2 for 3DNow!) 32 single precision FP numbers. Since 128 bit registers will not fit into the 80 bit space allocated for saving the FP registers, OS's will have to be updated for them to switch between 2 KNI tasks, but a doubling of the FP bandwidth makes that very worthwhile.

(Ok... I goofed confusing it with integer 16bit stuff, so I updated the article. Thanks for pointing that out.)

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