Pentium III review

Dennis "Thresh" Fong wrote in about a review of the as-yet unreleased Pentium III. As we know, the Pentium III (Katmai) introduces 71 Katmai New Instructions (KNI): floating point SIMD instructions. While 3D-Now! and MMX cannot be used simultaneously to x87 FPU instructions, requiring the use of a state change instruction, apparently KNI will avoid this performance penalty by using a new processor mode. If you remember MMX was made multitasking independent (no specific MMX state to save/restore when switching between processes) by piggy-backing onto the FP-registers whose state is saved by all x86 multitasking OS's. Since the new mode is only activated if the OS knows about it, this is a safe way for Intel to improve performance. Hemos:This is strange-I posted this before, but it seems to have vanished-can't figure out why. We're looking into it.