Normal computers (486, old style Pentiums) actually have two separate computers on the main chip: a 486 or Pentium, and a floating point computer which handles numbers. An MMX machine has effectively six computers on the chip: a Pentium, a floating point computer, and four parallel MMX computers. The MMX computers are very small, very limited computers: they have only a very few instructions, and can only do very limited simple things. However, it happens that the things these computers do are just like the things BrainMaker does.
On an MMX machine, we detect the MMX computer's presence when BrainMaker starts up, and we switch over our engine from calculating one thing at a time on the Pentium to calculating four things at a time on the MMX computers.
Additionally, the MMX computers have a special instruction which multiplies and adds at the same time. We use this instruction to actually get more than four things to happen at once. Also, MMX machines have improved caching, and therefore run faster than normal Pentiums even for normal computing. Because of this, BrainMaker on an MMX machine runs up to 6 times faster than BrainMaker on an identical non-MMX machine. For example, BrainMaker on a Pentium/MMX 200mhz runs up to 6 times faster than BrainMaker on a Pentium 200mhz. View Benchmarks.
BrainMaker v3.7 and BrainMaker Professional v3.7 are 32 bit programs which run under Windows 95 and Windows NT, and recognize and use the MMX processors if you have them. Currently, the following chips have MMX processors:
Intel Pentium / MMX
Intel Pentium Pro / MMX
Intel Pentium II / MMX
Cyrix 6x86 MX
AMD K6
IDT WinChip
Not sure what you have? Download our MMX testing software.
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