Intel's new Media Benchmark was obviously written to demonstrate the superior MMX architecture. An improvement of almost 470% over the Pentium Classic at the same speed looks really impressive. Overall the benchmark promises a performance advantage of 63% over the Pentium Classic.

However, we obviously have to be careful with these results. This program comes from Intel and this means it's running under ideal conditions. As long as an image processing program doesn't use the MMX instructions, you hardly will see any improvement in these dimensions at all. c't Magazine however showed, that with the latest Adobe Photoshop you can reach an improvement of up to 270% over the Pentium Classic.

The most embarrassing result for Intel in this benchmark is the 3D Graphics result. Although Intel certainly does everything to make the Pentium MMX look good, there's only an improvement of puny 3.7 % in 3D Graphics. I would really like to know what that means. Can't we even expect any 3D Graphics improvement for the future, when 3D programs are actually using MMX?

Guess Intel has to answer some serious questions here.