But Klamath's official debut won't be done in one fell swoop. Instead, Intel is doing a marketing two-step. On Friday, Feb. 14th, Intel announced the new product name -- Pentium II -- which will be used when Klamath hits the streets. That will happen sometime in April, at which point Intel is expected to do the official product roll-out.

Such frenetic activity highlights the fact that Intel's got a lot riding on its MMX technology, which adds 57 new instructions to the X86 instruction set. The multimedia extensions boost performance by using a single-instruction, multiple-data technique to process many chunks of data in parallel. For example, MMX can handle four 16-bit data elements in parallel (or eight byte-long data elements) with just one instruction.

One indication of MMX's importance is the money Intel is pouring into a series of consumer-oriented television commercials, which debuted during the Super Bowl. The first of the two spots features actor Jason Alexander, of the hit sitcom "Seinfeld," atte mpting to impress a blind date he's called using an MMX PC running Intel's Proshare videoconferencing software. While the hapless Alexander -- or is it "George"? -- chats on the videophone, the room collapses around him and the scene dissolves into an "Intel Inside" logo.

The second spot, titled "Bunny Suits," features a group of clean-room workers dancing around a semiconductor fab to the disco-era classic, "Play that Funky Music (White Boy)." The parenthetical portion of the title isn't heard in the commercial.

Despite the consumer mirth, Klamath and the P55C present some interesting engineering challenges. Software developers must follow a lengthy series of guidelines from Intel that specify how to create optimized MMX code. Intel has also issued a major revised guideline, in response to what it said was "a signif icant side-effect delay on Klamath."

For components suppliers and motherboard OEMs, the big issue is finding a way to supply the complex range of highly regulated voltages that must be delivered to Klamath on the motherboard. EE Times's Stephan Ohr has explored the issue in detail, in two groundbreaking articles that appeared last month in the print edition. They are available via EE Times Online: See "Intel stirs power pot: Klamath poses major voltage challenges" and "Intel makes it tough on supply designers."

Turning back to software, for some additional insight into the subject of Pentium Pro optimization, Intel is offering a tutorial in a 2.2-Mb file that you can download from the Web.

Clearly, MMX processors have a lot of headroom. One indication of that came at t he recent International Solid State Circuits Conference, in San Francisco. There, Intel showcased a Klamath chip that runs at 300 MHz.

Have an opinion, comment or question about the Wintel platform? Explore next-generation design challenges -- things like MMX, DirectX and Univeral Serial Bus -- with other EE Times readers on our new Wintel Watch forum.

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