The Pentium® processor with MMX™ technology is a significant addition to the Pentium® processor family. Available at 166, 200, and 233 MHz, it is the first microprocessor to support Intel MMX technology. The Pentium processor with MMX technology runs current software 10-20% faster than the original Pentium processor at the same clock speed. Software designed for Intel MMX technology unleashes the additional performance provided by Intel MMX technology, enabling more colors, more realistic graphics, full-screen, full-motion video, and other media-rich enhancements. The improvement will be determined by the type of application and the degree to which it has been designed for MMX technology. Intel's media benchmark, which measures multimedia performance, runs more than 60% faster than on a Pentium processor with MMX technology than it does on the original Pentium processor at the same clock speed. 

Processor Description
The Pentium processor with MMX technology is designed for mainstream desktops and is both software- and pin-compatible with previous members of the Pentium processor family. It contains 4.5 million transistors and is manufactured on Intel's enhanced 0.35 micron process. This process uses CMOS and voltage reduction technology for low power and high density. This enables the Pentium processor with MMX technology to remain within the thermal envelope of the original Pentium processor while providing a significant performance increase.

The Pentium processor with MMX technology offers several micro-architectural enhancements over previous members of the Pentium processor family.

• Doubled code and data caches to 16K each. On-chip L1 data and code cache sizes have been doubled to 16 Kbytes each on the Pentium processor with MMX technology. Larger separate internal caches improve performance by reducing average memory access time and providing fast access to recently used instructions and data. The instruction and data caches can be accessed simultaneously while the dual-ported data cache supports two data references simultaneously. The data cache supports a write-back (or alternately, writethrough, on a line by line basis) policy for memory updates.
• Improved branch prediction. Dynamic branch prediction uses the Branch Target Buffer (BTB) to boost performance by predicting the most likely set of instructions to be executed. The BTB has been improved on the Pentium processor with MMX technology to increase its accuracy.
• Enhanced pipeline. To improve performance, an additional pipeline stage has been added.
• Deeper write buffers. A pool of four write buffers is now shared between the dual pipelines to improve memory write performance.
• Full support for Intel MMX technology. MMX technology is based on a single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) technique, which enables increased performance on a wide variety of media-rich and communications applications. The Pentium processor with MMX technology supports 57 new instructions and 4 new 64-bit data types. Existing operating systems and application software are fully compatible with the Pentium processor with MMX technology.

The Pentium processor with MMX technology also includes several features used for testing and performance monitoring.