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Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (32359)	4/17/1998 5:32:00 PM
From: Ian deSouza	Respond to of 50808

For the price of these chips, I think that OEMs will buy cube chips for the video stream to relieve that expensive CPU of processing power that a $20 CUBE chip could do... like run Windows 98 and who knows what else coming down the software pike. Letting an expensive machine get out the door with the possibility of a sub-$1000 machine doing video better (with a CUBE chip in it) seems like a bit of a risk. I think Intel is doing this as more of a PR attempt than real science. Like someone mentioned, the CPU could handle sound in software too, yet they still sell sound cards. The way a processor works should dismiss the idea of software decode by the CPU (if one wants quality video images). If just one process other than the video process, gets enough of the CPU's time slice, it renders the video process in a suspended state. The frame rate of the video has to be within narrow threshold or else you get jerky pictures. There's no way to ensure that the CPU grants the video process enough juice to get a good picture no matter how fast the processor, given that there's enough other software processes running that draws that "balance" of the CPU utilization.