Remember MMX? Well it's back!

NEWS Intel has brought MMX multimedia instructions - well known from the PC market of five or so years ago - to its XScale and StrataFlash products, increasingly used to power mobile and wireless devices. Intel Wireless MMX should help developers port software to devices that use Intel PCA (Personal Internet Client Architecture) components. Ron Smith, senior VP and GM Intel Wireless Communications and Computing Group, said: "MMX has been around for some time but that's the point. [It's about] building multimedia capacity into processors, migrating [software] from PCs to mobile devices." Many thousands of applications have already been written that tap MMX and the hope is that the latest move will make multimedia content on handhelds easier. Intel Wireless MMX technology is launched supported by OSes used on mobile devices including Embedix, Linux, Palm OS, Symbian OS and Windows CE.Net 4.1. A software development kit is now available from Intel.