Cyrix famously had to skirt IP laws by using TI and IBM foundries because those two companies had full Intel 3rd party licenses. Cyrix was sued and paid big bucks settlement just to be able to use Intels patent 338 (long expired). Later cross licensing had little to do with Cyrix, and more with National owning crapload of patents they could use to retaliate against Intel - that 1998 deal https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1998/CN0203... resulted in full cross licensing allowing National build straight 1:1 copies of Intel chips if they desired.

When VIA bought Cyrix from National they didnt inherit ANY of those licenses. VIA was sued just as original Cyrix and National did, and once again had to pay big bucks to settle despite just aquiring Centaur with a bunch of patents and Intel license https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/intel-and-via-set...

Current version of Chrome seems to be 152.0.7977.39 released August 14, 2026.

August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based vivaldis napshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:

"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"

Edit: and latest August 14, 2026 Chromium 152.0.7977.38 based Snapshot https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/address-field-calculator-an... has this in patch notes:

"[Extensions] Re-enable and extend Manifest V2 extension support for the time being (VB-130324)"

POD "Designed for Intel MMX" meant _one_ optional audio filter effect. It was added in order for Ubisoft to cash out $1 Million bribe Intel was handling out while running new Pentium Inside campaign. Intel later tried repeating same stunt with SSE while promoting new Pentium 3, but failed to bag any serious takers other than Rage Software. Rage made a fake game demo (Dispatched) for Intel 1999 Comdex Fall booth which Intel used to manipulate benchmarks for a couple years by lying to Anandtech claiming its a real game :| https://web.archive.org/web/20210807020603/https://www.anand... https://www.hardware.fr/articles/95-5/jeux-optimises.html

Two other examples from that link are SSE "optimized" Rage Software Expendables running slower than original, and "Pentium III optimized" PowerSlide by GT Interactive with zero fps difference. Neither ever released outside of Intels Comdex booth and marketing materials.

>Even though Quake and Quake II are often used as examples of games that benefited from MMX technology, it's important to point out that Quake's famous software renderer predates MMX.

Quake benefitted from MMX processors because those models had doubled L1 cache size :) No one cared about MMX, but jump from 16 KB to 32 KB meant visible fps bump in all games.

> So, Quake's fast performance was achieved primarily through techniques like fixed-point arithmetic

Quake didnt use fixed point math, whole magic of Quake relied on taking full advantage of pipelined FPU. Quake was never optimized for data locality tho and loved cache, the more the better. It scales linearly all the way to 2MB of L2 https://dependency-injection.com/2mb-cache-benchmarks/ and probably would higher if we had platforms supporting more to run tests.

>Many games and other multimedia applications shipped with optional MMX code paths

No, exact opposite. Barely any games, pretty much only the ones where Intel paid that $1m bribe, shipped with any MMX support directly because it was Integer only DSP like accelerator good for Audio/Video but useless for 3D.

>Real floating-point SIMD for x86 didn't arrive until SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) several years later with the Pentium III series.

but

>The first processor to ship with 3DNow! technology was the AMD K6-2 from 1998.

So which is it? :)

>3DNow! was never more popular than MMX.

It was much more popular where it counted considering game developers implemented it without bribes and it actually made games run faster. 3DNow's biggest problem was being introduced in bargain bin low end K6-2 CPUs.

>Developers faced the choice of supporting either Intel CPUs or AMD CPUs

True dichotomy. There is no choice because both technologies provide distinct non overlapping and non interchangeable features. Its like saying "Developers faced the choice of supporting audio filters or faster 3D"

>choosing MMX meant potentially supporting a larger fraction of PC gamers

MMX was _useless_ for early 3D accelerated gaming with CPU still having to perform FPU heavy T&L. Adding any MMX code meant lowering FPU performance of the renderer.

>If you wrote a 3DNow!-optimized renderer, it would only benefit AMD chips that supported it.

The difference being 3DNow!, unlike MMX, actually did benefit AMD owners FPS numbers. NovaLogic software based Voxel renderer is the sole exception, NovaLogic might be the only company consciously using MMX in a game without a bribe :o

>Finally, the ultimate blow to AMD's 3DNow! was Intel's introduction of SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) with the Pentium III in 1999.

Look at start of my comment :) Its super hard to find a game benchmark that visibly showed SSE having a positive effect. Partly because first SSE implementations werent that great, partly because developers were still learning SIMD programming.

>what ultimately made the old MMX registers unnecessary? If you ask retro tech enthusiasts, most answers would point to the introduction of SSE2 by Intel in 2000.

The ultimate blow was being useless beyond DSP tasks (fixed point video/audio/soft modem). Whole idea of MMX came from Intel's Native Signal Processing (NSP) initiative started after they bought Digital Video Interactive (DVI) division from General Electric (developed at famous Sarnoff Research Center). Intel wanted to own software peripherals, Gates didnt like this and made them kill NSP https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/1998/11/11/microsoft-sai...

MMX wasnt even good at fast memory transfers losing to MOVSD. Pentium MMX 'rep movsd' 0.27 cycles per byte, Mem copy with MMX registers 0.29 cycles per byte. Dead link: http://www.pennelynn.com/Documents/CUJ/HTML/14.12/DURHAM1/DU... sadly archive.org didnt catch it in time :( only https://web.archive.org/web/20241202110443/http://www.pennel... remains. SSE2 finally beat MOVSD in 2000.

Im sure this can be automated, but I want to see what Im disabling instead of going bulk all.

They can always cut down on candles, they will be fine.

DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'

@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and it worked, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.