Pentium Processor MMX Technology Microarchitecture
For years, Intel introduced its Pentium family to replace the 486
processor. It started with the Pentium 75 and rapidly increased to Pentium
200 in matter of two years. Last year again Intel added MMX technology to
the Pentium chip to enhance its multimedia capabilities. Then came Intel's
Pentium II, which targeted to increase the capabilities towards the
home-geared MMX chips and the business-geared Pentium Pros. The challenges
of implementing MMX technology in the Pentium II processor were in adding
a major functionality while creating minimal disturbance to the base
microarchitecture.
In 1993 Pentium processor has dominated the home market. It became
a major consumer of PCs with a boost coming from multimedia applications.
Originally, hardware and the right software supported multimedia
applications. The situation increased the price of computers and the lack
of standards on the market. The Intel Architecture personals envisioned
the need of execution operations for multimedia on the core CPU. Due to
the major change in the CPU, The product has a standard for the industry.
It also reduced the cost of the computers and free up motherboard
expansion slots.
According to Intel Architecture Group, in order to exceed the
performance of it predecessor, the team must improve the Frequency Speed and CPI Performance of the microprocessor. Both can be accomplished with microarchitecture changes implemented in the new processor. The Pentium II processor is based on the dynamic execution microarchitecture of the Pentium Pro processor. The Pentium II processor's microarchitechture improves graphic performance and to implement MMX technology. An off-chip second-level cache was redesigned to allow low cost commodity SRAMs to be used as second-level cache.