Intel has made a firm commitment to the architecture - all of its processors from now on will include MMX - designed to allow several multimedia tasks, such as frame manipulations, to be carried out simultaneously.

Andy Grove, Intel's president, said at Comdex last year that the PC industry must fight television to catch the consumer's eye.

Which is why MMX has been designed to deliver lifelike colour, full-screen video and graphics, real-time animation and image manipulation and 3D audio.

But at the moment it's a technology in search of an application.

MMX will not improve the performance of existing software, but instead requires code to be written specially for it.

For almost any other supplier this bleeding edge approach could create a problem, but Intel owns the market, and therefore, by definition controls it.

We will buy MMX but the real question is when?