> Each MMX register is 64 bits wide. Internally, the MMX registers were aliases of the x87 floating-point registers.
Due to the way the first Pentium 3 CPUs (Katmai) were built, they likewise aliased the x87 (and thus, MMX) registers to the XMM SSE registers, but this was hidden from programs. It wasn't until at least the Coppermine revision that they were separate registers again.
I remember hearing a rumour as a young teen that the Coppermine codename meant it actually had copper wiring and that's what made it faster somehow. Copper has lower resistance than aluminium and can therefore help chips run faster - it makes sense! But it was just a codename and the coppermine had aluminium interconnects.
My family got a PIII 533Mhz coppermine, in the early sideways Slot 1 configuration. Blazing fast at the time. Been a long time since I heard anyone say "coppermine".
CPU progress was wild in the 90s, where you could wait two years and your new CPU would be double the old one's speed at the same price point. Today it takes near a decade for CPU speed to double.
I also recall the first game that advertised its exciting use of the new MMX technology: POD.[1]
Copper interconnects might have been introduced around then, but I suspect the naming is more coincidental than anything.
I remember just after IBM got copper interconnects working, there was a stock market dive, I ranted to my partner about how crazy it is for a company to achieve a sought after goal and have its value decrease. The next day there was a news story about the entire market decline being stalled by the force of IBM buying back it's own shares. My partner told me I should rant less and invest more.
Haha, yeah the rumour came around at a time when there was real work going on with copper interconnects which just confused the situation, but the coppermine didn't use them.
I would add than SSE1 and SSE2 are now required parts of AMD64 instruction set. All 64-bit PC processors are required to support them both. For that reason, modern compilers are ignoring x87 FPU when building 64-bit binaries. Instead, they compile all float and double arithmetic into SSE1 and SSE2 instructions, respectively.
Take a look at the micro-architecture levels. x86-64-v1 contains all the instructions that the original AMD64 and compatible Intel CPUs supported. v2 is all the SSE levels, v3 is AVX and AVX2, v4 is AVX-512.
"Additional XMM (SSE) registers: Similarly, the number of 128-bit XMM registers (used for Streaming SIMD instructions) is also increased from 8 to 16...
"The original AMD64 architecture adopted Intel's SSE and SSE2 as core instructions."
x86-64 mandates SSE2 as a minimum requirement because it uses the SSE registers in the ABI for implementing float (which requires SSE) and double (which requires SSE2) arithmetic. (The x87 unit, which is what the 32-bit x86 ABI uses, can only do extended-precision arithmetic, which causes a whole heap of problems). Because it's so thoroughly integrated in the ABI, v1 has to have a min-SSE2 requirement.
Subsequently, there were additional instructions added in SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2, which are all incorporated into the v2 ISA level (along with a few other instructions). Then all of these instructions were given 256-bit variants in AVX, and AVX2 adds some more vector instructions; these are incorporated into the v3 ISA level. And then along comes AVX-512 and naming just becomes a podge at that point...
Not sure what your question is. I dont see any contradiction with the parent comment. SSE went to version 4.2 (it gets complicated in the numbering and even naming). Only 1 and 2 were included in the base 64-bit ISA.
Which is not to say that they are necessarily auto-vectorizing. You know wassup when you see vaddsd instead of vaddpd. And ideally you'd use AVX-512 to saturate a modern cache line if you can afford to drop support for the older devices.
Compilers like GCC and Clang treat C's "long double" type by default as 80-bit wide and result in x87 generated code. This can be overridden to use either 64-bit or 128-bit floating point values.
When MMX first came out and there were games that supported it, many reviewers were convinced that it improved 3D performance. As far as I could tell, it wasn't really used for 3D and that the only enhancement was to the audio system. But the placebo effect of "If has MMX thus its better" did stick around for a long while.
An aside, but when SSE came a long that was a real big leap in 3D performance, just as GPU's started to gain some independence. So in about 2010, I tried to fire up Turok 2 just to see how fast it would run on a then modern CPU/GPU setup. It couldn't crack 200fps, however games only a year or two later would fly way past that. Turok 2 came out just before SSE and thus basically ran in purely x86/x87 space, thus the performance gap.
AFAIK, MMX was more for fixed point math (as also pointed out by another commenter) which would explain why it wasn't used much for 3D. You tended to see it more in image and sound processing code. Maybe the reviewers got it mixed up with 3DNow.
MMX did help significantly with software 3D rendering. I worked on a software rasterizer that benefited significantly from it. But it didn't take long before even a well-optimized software renderer on a high end CPU couldn't keep up with a low end GPU on a low end CPU.
What’s often overlooked is that adoption of MMX was slooooow. Intel compiler were the only intrinsic data types for years. The big win was DirectX 3 audio drivers that used premade Intel libraries. It took at least five to ten years for SIMD to catch on, but the never stopped Intel from evolving it. Then they lost the GPU wars lol rip larabeee.
MMX had heavy adoption in image and video processing. IDCT, motion prediction/compensation, YUV/RGB conversion, and alpha blending all benefited from it.
I did extensive MMX and SSE2 optimization of audio and video codecs in the 2000s. MMX made a large difference, but it was a pain.
MMX optimization practically required assembly language. The Pentium MMX was an in-order dual pipe CPU, and while compilers supported MMX intrinsics, their code generation for it was abysmal. Visual C++ 6, for instance, would emit code that was 2/3rds register-to-register moves, with values being unnecessarily moved between two registers between each ALU op. This was also a problem with SSE/SSE2 intrinsics. The worst case I saw was the _mm_set_epi8() intrinsic, which was used to construct a 128-bit vector from 16 inputs. When used with all constants, it should have generated a single 128-bit constant load; instead, Visual Studio 2008 generated ~80 instructions to compute it from byte loads. Microsoft didn't fix it until VS2010.
The latency of MMX instructions combined with the in-order dual pipe architecture also made asm loops messy. Simple ops were single-cycle, but multiplies had 3 cycle latency, stores required data an additional cycle in advance, and computed load/store addresses were also needed a cycle in advance. Simply running 2-4 iterations in parallel wasn't an option as there were only 8 vector registers and you'd still get bottlenecks on functional units. Getting peak performance thus often required interleaving loop iterations with special entry and exit code around the loop.
The issue with EMMS is understated. When the CPU switched to MMX, it marked the entire x87 stack as full. If you forgot the EMMS instruction, it wasn't just some strange floating-point bugs that would happen -- the next few x87 floating point calculations could just outright produce NaNs due to FP stack overflow. Furthermore, as these NaNs propagated, the CPU required microcode assists to handle them. So, even if the program didn't crash, an entire calculation domain would get poisoned and slow down by ~20x.
Ultimately, I don't think SSE2 was what killed MMX, but rather SSE, and specifically floating point. MMX not only didn't support floating point, but was also highly concentrated on 16-bit signed integers and secondarily 8-bit unsigned integers. Support for 32-bit integers was particularly lacking and pack/unpack conversions were a bottleneck. Trying to do 3D was cramped because doing so required fixed-point and MMX didn't have the same affordances as DSPs or NEON for rounding or implicit narrow/widen in operations, or even swizzles. SSE, on the other hand, was just straight floating point with standard automatic IEEE rounding and also had important added operations like swizzles and insert/extract. Thus, when 3D took off, SSE was far more useful than MMX.
MMX, however, still remained useful for a while for image and signal processing. SSE2 being twice as wide didn't help algorithms that couldn't use the greater width, such as 8x8 block motion prediction. Additionally, some CPUs at the time only had a 64-bit data path and had to split SSE2 ops, but because of their 4-1-1 decode template, could only decode one such instruction per cycle. The result was that code using the MMX registers could still run noticeably faster than with the SSE registers. This caused some confusion with the 64-bit version of Windows since Microsoft tried to say that x87/MMX shouldn't be used in long mode, but after queries from video processing companies had to document that the x87/MMX registers were enabled and context switched for user mode code.
> Additionally, some CPUs at the time only had a 64-bit data path and had to split SSE2 ops, but because of their 4-1-1 decode template, could only decode one such instruction per cycle.
I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
> This caused some confusion with the 64-bit version of Windows since Microsoft tried to say that x87/MMX shouldn't be used in long mode, but after queries from video processing companies had to document that the x87/MMX registers were enabled and context switched for user mode code.
I have some faint memories of hearing somewhere that Long Mode didn't support x87. I wonder if it is related to this early info you mention and it being Microsoft specific.
> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
No, all Pentium 3s as well as the Pentium M. Pentium 4 notably didn't suffer from it, but it of course had many, many, MANY other performance issues.
> I have some faint memories of hearing somewhere that Long Mode didn't support x87. I wonder if it is related to this early info you mention and it being Microsoft specific.
It was VM86 mode that Long Mode didn't support, which was one of the rumored reasons for removing 16-bit NTVDM support (among many). x87 and MMX were always supported in long mode and notably some libraries like OpenBLAS still use x87 instructions. Windows does prohibit use of x87/MMX in kernel mode where the need is negligible.
>> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
> No, all Pentium 3s as well as the Pentium M. Pentium 4 notably didn't suffer from it, but it of course had many, many, MANY other performance issues.
I had to google a bit to confirm this, and seems like I'm not the only one that understood it the way I did:
Basically, the info I knew was that Katmai had 128 Bits SSE registers but processed it as 2x64 Bits. That info is well reference pretty much everywhere. What is NOT explicitly mentioned is whenever Coppermine/Tualatin maintained that arrangement or had 128 Bits compute units for SSE, so the wording always made Katmai to look like an exception, as if everything else was 128 Bits.
> which was one of the rumored reasons for removing 16-bit NTVDM support
They already had a 16-bit software emulator for running NTVDM on other archs.
Apparently the real reason was they wanted to drop some software compatibility restrictions, like the small max size of HANDLE tables needed for 16-bit compat.
> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
No, the Pentium M (Banias / Dothan) also needed multiple cycles for basic SSE2 ops (with a few exceptions like PUNPCKLQDQ or PMOVMSKB), a full four years after Katmai (source: I owned one, and wrote SIMD on it for codec libraries).
As someone on the other side... the difference was between 166 "regular" VS 133 MMX. And in less than two years it became irrelevant: '97 for MMX, '99 fo GeForce 256.
MMX in did not become irrelevant with the GeForce 256. Hardware video decoding was only in its infancy at the time and even the highest end GPUs only supported motion compensation acceleration for decoding only at best. Non-display image processing on the GPU was heavily bottlenecked by very slow read-back speeds from the GPU to the CPU across the AGP bus.
Well, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.
It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.
Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).
> Each MMX register is 64 bits wide. Internally, the MMX registers were aliases of the x87 floating-point registers.
Due to the way the first Pentium 3 CPUs (Katmai) were built, they likewise aliased the x87 (and thus, MMX) registers to the XMM SSE registers, but this was hidden from programs. It wasn't until at least the Coppermine revision that they were separate registers again.
I remember hearing a rumour as a young teen that the Coppermine codename meant it actually had copper wiring and that's what made it faster somehow. Copper has lower resistance than aluminium and can therefore help chips run faster - it makes sense! But it was just a codename and the coppermine had aluminium interconnects.
My family got a PIII 533Mhz coppermine, in the early sideways Slot 1 configuration. Blazing fast at the time. Been a long time since I heard anyone say "coppermine".
CPU progress was wild in the 90s, where you could wait two years and your new CPU would be double the old one's speed at the same price point. Today it takes near a decade for CPU speed to double.
I also recall the first game that advertised its exciting use of the new MMX technology: POD.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POD_(video_game)
Copper interconnects might have been introduced around then, but I suspect the naming is more coincidental than anything.
I remember just after IBM got copper interconnects working, there was a stock market dive, I ranted to my partner about how crazy it is for a company to achieve a sought after goal and have its value decrease. The next day there was a news story about the entire market decline being stalled by the force of IBM buying back it's own shares. My partner told me I should rant less and invest more.
Haha, yeah the rumour came around at a time when there was real work going on with copper interconnects which just confused the situation, but the coppermine didn't use them.
It makes it easier to save and restore state when it's basically the same registers used differently.
Author here. Thanks for sharing.
I would add than SSE1 and SSE2 are now required parts of AMD64 instruction set. All 64-bit PC processors are required to support them both. For that reason, modern compilers are ignoring x87 FPU when building 64-bit binaries. Instead, they compile all float and double arithmetic into SSE1 and SSE2 instructions, respectively.
Extended double has some niche and quite useful for its application properties. You can for instance simulate 128 bit floats more easily with it.
Take a look at the micro-architecture levels. x86-64-v1 contains all the instructions that the original AMD64 and compatible Intel CPUs supported. v2 is all the SSE levels, v3 is AVX and AVX2, v4 is AVX-512.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...
The wiki says:
"Additional XMM (SSE) registers: Similarly, the number of 128-bit XMM registers (used for Streaming SIMD instructions) is also increased from 8 to 16...
"The original AMD64 architecture adopted Intel's SSE and SSE2 as core instructions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
This wansn't v2?
x86-64 mandates SSE2 as a minimum requirement because it uses the SSE registers in the ABI for implementing float (which requires SSE) and double (which requires SSE2) arithmetic. (The x87 unit, which is what the 32-bit x86 ABI uses, can only do extended-precision arithmetic, which causes a whole heap of problems). Because it's so thoroughly integrated in the ABI, v1 has to have a min-SSE2 requirement.
Subsequently, there were additional instructions added in SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1 and SSE4.2, which are all incorporated into the v2 ISA level (along with a few other instructions). Then all of these instructions were given 256-bit variants in AVX, and AVX2 adds some more vector instructions; these are incorporated into the v3 ISA level. And then along comes AVX-512 and naming just becomes a podge at that point...
Not sure what your question is. I dont see any contradiction with the parent comment. SSE went to version 4.2 (it gets complicated in the numbering and even naming). Only 1 and 2 were included in the base 64-bit ISA.
Which is not to say that they are necessarily auto-vectorizing. You know wassup when you see vaddsd instead of vaddpd. And ideally you'd use AVX-512 to saturate a modern cache line if you can afford to drop support for the older devices.
Compilers like GCC and Clang treat C's "long double" type by default as 80-bit wide and result in x87 generated code. This can be overridden to use either 64-bit or 128-bit floating point values.
When MMX first came out and there were games that supported it, many reviewers were convinced that it improved 3D performance. As far as I could tell, it wasn't really used for 3D and that the only enhancement was to the audio system. But the placebo effect of "If has MMX thus its better" did stick around for a long while.
An aside, but when SSE came a long that was a real big leap in 3D performance, just as GPU's started to gain some independence. So in about 2010, I tried to fire up Turok 2 just to see how fast it would run on a then modern CPU/GPU setup. It couldn't crack 200fps, however games only a year or two later would fly way past that. Turok 2 came out just before SSE and thus basically ran in purely x86/x87 space, thus the performance gap.
AFAIK, MMX was more for fixed point math (as also pointed out by another commenter) which would explain why it wasn't used much for 3D. You tended to see it more in image and sound processing code. Maybe the reviewers got it mixed up with 3DNow.
MMX did help significantly with software 3D rendering. I worked on a software rasterizer that benefited significantly from it. But it didn't take long before even a well-optimized software renderer on a high end CPU couldn't keep up with a low end GPU on a low end CPU.
What’s often overlooked is that adoption of MMX was slooooow. Intel compiler were the only intrinsic data types for years. The big win was DirectX 3 audio drivers that used premade Intel libraries. It took at least five to ten years for SIMD to catch on, but the never stopped Intel from evolving it. Then they lost the GPU wars lol rip larabeee.
MMX had heavy adoption in image and video processing. IDCT, motion prediction/compensation, YUV/RGB conversion, and alpha blending all benefited from it.
Thanks for the reminder. Yes Intel was touting high bit rates in software compared to the matrox millennium hardware 2d accelerator.
And now the legacy of Larrabee, AVX-512, is only properly available on AMD for consumers :D
I did extensive MMX and SSE2 optimization of audio and video codecs in the 2000s. MMX made a large difference, but it was a pain.
MMX optimization practically required assembly language. The Pentium MMX was an in-order dual pipe CPU, and while compilers supported MMX intrinsics, their code generation for it was abysmal. Visual C++ 6, for instance, would emit code that was 2/3rds register-to-register moves, with values being unnecessarily moved between two registers between each ALU op. This was also a problem with SSE/SSE2 intrinsics. The worst case I saw was the _mm_set_epi8() intrinsic, which was used to construct a 128-bit vector from 16 inputs. When used with all constants, it should have generated a single 128-bit constant load; instead, Visual Studio 2008 generated ~80 instructions to compute it from byte loads. Microsoft didn't fix it until VS2010.
The latency of MMX instructions combined with the in-order dual pipe architecture also made asm loops messy. Simple ops were single-cycle, but multiplies had 3 cycle latency, stores required data an additional cycle in advance, and computed load/store addresses were also needed a cycle in advance. Simply running 2-4 iterations in parallel wasn't an option as there were only 8 vector registers and you'd still get bottlenecks on functional units. Getting peak performance thus often required interleaving loop iterations with special entry and exit code around the loop.
The issue with EMMS is understated. When the CPU switched to MMX, it marked the entire x87 stack as full. If you forgot the EMMS instruction, it wasn't just some strange floating-point bugs that would happen -- the next few x87 floating point calculations could just outright produce NaNs due to FP stack overflow. Furthermore, as these NaNs propagated, the CPU required microcode assists to handle them. So, even if the program didn't crash, an entire calculation domain would get poisoned and slow down by ~20x.
Ultimately, I don't think SSE2 was what killed MMX, but rather SSE, and specifically floating point. MMX not only didn't support floating point, but was also highly concentrated on 16-bit signed integers and secondarily 8-bit unsigned integers. Support for 32-bit integers was particularly lacking and pack/unpack conversions were a bottleneck. Trying to do 3D was cramped because doing so required fixed-point and MMX didn't have the same affordances as DSPs or NEON for rounding or implicit narrow/widen in operations, or even swizzles. SSE, on the other hand, was just straight floating point with standard automatic IEEE rounding and also had important added operations like swizzles and insert/extract. Thus, when 3D took off, SSE was far more useful than MMX.
MMX, however, still remained useful for a while for image and signal processing. SSE2 being twice as wide didn't help algorithms that couldn't use the greater width, such as 8x8 block motion prediction. Additionally, some CPUs at the time only had a 64-bit data path and had to split SSE2 ops, but because of their 4-1-1 decode template, could only decode one such instruction per cycle. The result was that code using the MMX registers could still run noticeably faster than with the SSE registers. This caused some confusion with the 64-bit version of Windows since Microsoft tried to say that x87/MMX shouldn't be used in long mode, but after queries from video processing companies had to document that the x87/MMX registers were enabled and context switched for user mode code.
> Additionally, some CPUs at the time only had a 64-bit data path and had to split SSE2 ops, but because of their 4-1-1 decode template, could only decode one such instruction per cycle.
I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
> This caused some confusion with the 64-bit version of Windows since Microsoft tried to say that x87/MMX shouldn't be used in long mode, but after queries from video processing companies had to document that the x87/MMX registers were enabled and context switched for user mode code.
I have some faint memories of hearing somewhere that Long Mode didn't support x87. I wonder if it is related to this early info you mention and it being Microsoft specific.
> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
No, all Pentium 3s as well as the Pentium M. Pentium 4 notably didn't suffer from it, but it of course had many, many, MANY other performance issues.
> I have some faint memories of hearing somewhere that Long Mode didn't support x87. I wonder if it is related to this early info you mention and it being Microsoft specific.
It was VM86 mode that Long Mode didn't support, which was one of the rumored reasons for removing 16-bit NTVDM support (among many). x87 and MMX were always supported in long mode and notably some libraries like OpenBLAS still use x87 instructions. Windows does prohibit use of x87/MMX in kernel mode where the need is negligible.
>> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
> No, all Pentium 3s as well as the Pentium M. Pentium 4 notably didn't suffer from it, but it of course had many, many, MANY other performance issues.
I had to google a bit to confirm this, and seems like I'm not the only one that understood it the way I did:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1360606#p1360606
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1360620#p1360620
Basically, the info I knew was that Katmai had 128 Bits SSE registers but processed it as 2x64 Bits. That info is well reference pretty much everywhere. What is NOT explicitly mentioned is whenever Coppermine/Tualatin maintained that arrangement or had 128 Bits compute units for SSE, so the wording always made Katmai to look like an exception, as if everything else was 128 Bits.
> which was one of the rumored reasons for removing 16-bit NTVDM support
They already had a 16-bit software emulator for running NTVDM on other archs.
Apparently the real reason was they wanted to drop some software compatibility restrictions, like the small max size of HANDLE tables needed for 16-bit compat.
> but it of course had many, many, MANY other performance issues.
The whole RAMBUS debacle... OTH DDR chipsets for Tualatin had shown what it was the end game for the P6 arch.
> I believe that only the first Pentium 3 core, Katmai, did this.
No, the Pentium M (Banias / Dothan) also needed multiple cycles for basic SSE2 ops (with a few exceptions like PUNPCKLQDQ or PMOVMSKB), a full four years after Katmai (source: I owned one, and wrote SIMD on it for codec libraries).
As someone on the other side... the difference was between 166 "regular" VS 133 MMX. And in less than two years it became irrelevant: '97 for MMX, '99 fo GeForce 256.
MMX in did not become irrelevant with the GeForce 256. Hardware video decoding was only in its infancy at the time and even the highest end GPUs only supported motion compensation acceleration for decoding only at best. Non-display image processing on the GPU was heavily bottlenecked by very slow read-back speeds from the GPU to the CPU across the AGP bus.
Well, GPUs in a modern understanding didn't came till GF4/GF4MX, when you could get something for less than $50.. at this moment MMX wasn't anywhere because SSE was. At this point you had an overlay display for the DivX/XviD and your average CPU could display the realtime video.
It came from GF3, which had full vertex and pixel shaders.
Also, the GF4MX was just a GeForce256 in a trenchcoat, and didn't have vertex shaders (at least exposed to software, the T&L engine was still a vertex shader like engine, only the code was all written by nvidia and loaded from ROM).