Ultimate MMX? SuperSocket7 motherboard with AGP and Tillamook mobile core overclocked to 300MHz. Totally can tickle PII 233 nerves.

Tillamook 266MHz and working L2 cache?

pentium MMX was intel's attempt to sell the p5 architecture for another year with overhyped MMX marketing, IMO. a p200mmx with SDRAM and all bells and whistles bought as "high-end" in early 1997 probably aged out the fastest compared to any other similarily priced setup of its day. tillamook is interesting but did people actually use them in desktop systems back in the day? compared to K6-2/III it seems like a pretty irrelevant upgrade option. a tillamook 300 potentially matching pii 233 doesn't sound exciting to me because by 1999 the pii 233 was budget range itself and SS7 meant replacing the motherboard anyway.

best case games for pentium MMX? i'd imagine rebel moon rising runs great on there, also duke3d actually runs a fair bit slower on klamath clock for clock, GTA 1 seems like another case that doesn't benefit from P6.

Used to have one an "ultimate" MMX build briefly, with a Pentium 233MMX overclocked to 262 MHz by setting the FSB to 75 MHz.

Things that would give it a lease of life would be UDMA support, SDRAM memory and not having the restriction of 64 MB cacheability limit found on most Intel 430 chipsets. At least it would be competitive with earlier P6-based CPUs but not with later iterations such as PII-400.

AGP support helps too, but they're hit and miss on SS7 motherboards. The useful ones are 3dfx cards as they don't use any AGP-specific features and depending on the chipset, nVidia cards with workarounds and early drivers.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-05-26, 12:43:

Things that would give it a lease of life would be UDMA support, SDRAM memory and not having the restriction of 64 MB cacheability limit found on most Intel 430 chipsets. At least it would be competitive with earlier P6-based CPUs but not with later iterations such as PII-400.

no, pii 233 would thrash this setup in newer 3d titles like half-life/unreal, even some 2d games like homm3 run much faster on pii clock for clock, tested this myself. and for a setup just running one game at a time without multitasking, i never perceived the 64 mb limit as much of an issue - games that really benefit from more memory will typically not run well on pentium mmx anyway. something like diablo 2 is totally unplayable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YtjPHU4oPA

i think this promo video highlights well how things were moving at the time. the pmmx was still pretty recent at that time but was already being used as an example of a crappy old processor that can't run the newest games fluently. these are literally games from the same year that p55c launched.

Pentium MMX is pretty much exactly what the name implies: a standard in-order Pentium CPU, with MMX instructions added.
However, because of the extra instructions, the decoding pipeline had to be modified somewhat, which makes certain operations 1 cycle slower than they were on a Pentium classic.

On the other hand, the Pentium II has a very different architecture, with deep pipelines and out-of-order architecture, which can reorder instructions at runtime (technically a Pentium II is what you'd expect a 'Pentium Pro MMX' to be). This new architecture has higher latency when executing instructions, but also has advanced means to hide this latency in many cases.
What it boils down to is that at the same clockspeed, the Pentium MMX can sometimes be faster than a Pentium II, especially with MMX code, when the Pentium II is not able to hide the latency well enough.
But the Pentium II compensates for that by offering much higher clockspeeds (the fastest Pentium MMX is 233 MHz, which is equal to the slowest Pentium II).

Aside from the CPU itself having higher clockspeed, the PII also came with new chipsets with higher FSB speed, AGP bus and support for faster memory.
For non-Intel CPUs like the AMD K6 series, a 'super socket 7' platform was developed, trying to backport these new technologies to socket 7-based CPUs. So you can get faster FSBs, AGP and faster memory on these socket 7 boards as well.
But afaik a Pentium MMX cannot take advantage of any of this.

To me, the Pentium 233 MMX is just the 'ultimate Pentium'. The last in-order x86 from Intel. So as far as Pentiums go, it's the best you can get.
But it won't stand up to the Pentium II or clones like the K6-series which can take advantage of super socket 7.

auron wrote on 2023-05-26, 13:01:

i never perceived the 64 mb limit as much of an issue - games that really benefit from more memory will typically not run well on pentium mmx anyway. something like diablo 2 is totally unplayable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YtjPHU4oPA

I know that 64 MB limitation isn't a big deal for games that works well on a Pentium MMX, but since this is about the "ultimate" build, why not? 😀

i think this promo video highlights well how things were moving at the time. the pmmx was still pretty recent at that time but was already being used as an example of a crappy old processor that can't run the newest games fluently. these are literally games from the same year that p55c launched.

MMX instructions were badly marketed, I find them more useful for other stuff than 3D rendering in practice.

Scali wrote on 2023-05-26, 13:35:

Pentium MMX is pretty much exactly what the name implies: a standard in-order Pentium CPU, with MMX instructions added.
However, because of the extra instructions, the decoding pipeline had to be modified somewhat, which makes certain operations 1 cycle slower than they were on a Pentium classic.

Not really. It's optimized and has larger caches. So in general it's faster than the non-MMX version.

auron wrote on 2023-05-26, 12:33:

tillamook is interesting but did people actually use them in desktop systems back in the day? compared to K6-2/III it seems like a pretty irrelevant upgrade option. a tillamook 300 potentially matching pii 233 doesn't sound exciting to me because by 1999 the pii 233 was budget range itself and SS7 meant replacing the motherboard anyway.

So when tillamook came out, I did wonder if it was a good option vs the k6 at the time. And of course everyone knows the performance numbers now. But expecting to find one that you could purchase then is kind of like trying to walk into a store and expecting to find the k6-3 or k6-2+/3+ unicorn speeds being sold. Because by the time those were made, Athlon was AMD's flagship, and they quickly cannibalized the k6 offering in the retail front as low budget, and only a few of the slower speeds hit stores, and where they mainly pushed it to laptop makers similarly because of their low voltage & low power due to less transistors on die. It was a die shrink. Tillamook is kind of in the same boat, but you have Intel even more picky about their chip lines overlapping each other cutting into their flagship line as well. Was Tillamook faster than the slowest P2? Maybe not really, but how do you price it? They probably killed Tillamook as soon as a P2 core was mobile ready.

HanSolo wrote on 2023-05-26, 13:54:

Not really. It's optimized and has larger caches. So in general it's faster than the non-MMX version.

I didn't say it was slower in general. I just said that some instructions have an extra cycle of latency because the pipeline is 6 stages instead of 5 on the regular Pentium.
But yes, I forgot to mention it had twice the L1 cache (16k code + 16k data as opposed to 8k code + 8k data), which allows it to be faster in many cases, so the extra cycle of latency can be hidden. Some other minor tweaks also help.
I was discussing it mostly from a microarchitectural point-of-view, not actual performance (anyone can look up benchmarks online).

gerry wrote on 2023-05-26, 11:52:

I have a pc with socket 7 mb, mmx Pentium at 166mhz, 64mb edo ram, mach64 and sb16 compatible isa card […]
Show full quote

I have a pc with socket 7 mb, mmx Pentium at 166mhz, 64mb edo ram, mach64 and sb16 compatible isa card

i bought it new in 1997 and at the time was aware of the mmx hype and pleased to own one

it felt (and still does) very responsive. even now with win 98 its fast, even with the non 3d video card it seemed capable of anything i had in 1997 (not so much by end of 1998! 😀 )

however i am very aware that mine is fairly ordinary, i follow some mmx build here with interest and so wondered what would be the 'ultimate' pentium 1 mmx build? perhaps you have one? would be interesting to see if top P1 mmx can even get close to early P2 set ups, whether super socket 7 gave new lease of life with agp etc

Excluding Tillamook, I'd say something like a P1 mmx set to run at 3x100MHz on a ss7 board using at least 128MB SDRAM with all of the memory cached. graphics card, I'd probably pair it with a Voodoo 2 or Banshee or something. 2D card (if using V2) doesn't really matter as long as it's AGP.

interesting points everyone, thanks. Aside from Tillamook based modifications it does seem that the P2 architectural improvements opened a significant gap that only the most optimised overclock and use of agp board could come close to closing

I do remember that time of rapid change and the MMX that was so fast in 97 lost ground in later 98 (though it was still great to me, and at least POD ran well 😀 ) so i'd wondered if there was any worthy bridge but as auron noted, a little patience and in 1999 the early P2s were becoming lower cost PCs already. In some ways i could have held on a bit longer after the P2 launch and maybe spent a bit more on a P2 and agp card

i never had a super socket 7 but the idea of mixing socket 7 and some more advanced features of newer boards is interesting as a partial bridge (although would be tempting to then go with K6)

so far removed from now - where the idea of stretching the board and cpu to just about cover 12-18 months of time awaiting the next architecture was a real consideration. Now it seems that whatever is new should be ok for years.

Scali wrote on 2023-05-26, 13:35:

But afaik a Pentium MMX cannot take advantage of any of this.

Even regular PMMX 233 can work at 100 MHz FSB and 250 MHz, which noticeably improves experience.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2023-05-26, 14:04:

They probably killed Tillamook as soon as a P2 core was mobile ready.

PII core was never really mobile ready due to power consumption, that's why PMMX existed alongside it

I vote for a build that was actually possible mid 1997.

Asus P55T2P4 revision 3.10 (Not the XP55T2P4)
Pentium MMX @ 3.5 x 83MHz (A real 233MHz model is best as others can be (upwards) multiplier locked)
2x32MB EDO able to run 83 MHz with tight timings.
Nvidia Riva128
Voodoo 1
SB AWE64 or some other period correct sound solution.

I'm not 100% certain if all Voodoo 1 and Riva128 cards are happy at 41.5 MHz PCI-bus so that part needs some investigation.

When the Intel 440LX chipset started seeing wide distribution Q4 1997 with boards like the ASUS P2L97 I feel that the window of time where spending lots of money on a Pentium MMX build made sense had ended. I sold lots of cheap overclocked Pentium MMX systems usually with cheap PC-Chips boards all through 1998 though! 😁

Also most of the Pentium 166 MMX CPUs should run fine with 250Mhz (100x2,5). Maybe with a little bit more VCore of 2,9V-3,0V, if the stock 2,8V are not enough.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-05-26, 16:20:

Even regular PMMX 233 can work at 100 MHz FSB and 250 MHz, which noticeably improves experience.

True, you can run them at these settings, but then you're overclocking. There is no official support for these settings, unlike with the clones.

I love my Pentium 1 233mmx.
I am in the process of fixing it up , but I cant wait to get it going again.

32 megs of ram
Sound blaster Live
3.5 inch and 5.25 inch drives
internal zip disk drive
Phillips DVD Rom
Voodoo 3 2000

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-05-26, 12:00:

300MHz.

Tourist!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqB4yCssUCM

Yeah, that will tickle the "almighty" K6-III too =P

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-05-26, 16:20:

the3dfxdude wrote on 2023-05-26, 14:04:

They probably killed Tillamook as soon as a P2 core was mobile ready.

PII core was never really mobile ready due to power consumption, that's why PMMX existed alongside it

Strange, I remember using a P2 on a thinkpad. But they weren't necessarily good for battery life! But it's quite typical that the mobile processors were the previous gen at low voltage and die shrunk. They didn't push them for desktop systems, which is why I didn't know anyone really making builds out of them back in the day.