MDMX
Extension to the MIPS architecture
The MDMX (MIPS Digital Media eXtension), also known as MaDMaX, is an extension to the MIPS architecture released in October 1996 at the Microprocessor Forum.
01History
MDMX was developed to accelerate multimedia applications that were becoming more popular and common in the 1990s on RISC and CISC systems.
02Functionality
MDMX defines a new set of thirty-two 64-bit registers called media registers, which are mapped onto the existing floating-point registers to save hardware; and a 192-bit extended product accumulator.
The media registers hold two new data types: octo byte (OB) and quad half (QH) that contain eight bytes (8-bit) and four halfwords (16-bit) integers.
Variants of existing instructions operate on these data types, performing saturating arithmetic, logical, shift, compare and align operations.
MDMX also introduced 19 instructions for permutation, manipulating bytes in registers, performing arithmetic with the accumulator, and accumulator access.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “MDMX”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.