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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (47611)	1/27/1999 10:17:00 PM
From: kash johal	Respond to of 1581723

Scumbria, >Re: The Intel vision has been to build high speed microprocessors, >and do everything in software. The Brian Halla (NSM) vision is to >build special purpose processors for each individual function in a >computer. >With the cost of chip real estate rapidly declining, it seems >inevitable that the Halla vision will win out. MMX, KNI, 3DNOW, >Software DVD, etc. are good examples of why this is true. I think you are way over simplifying matters. In general there are always tradeoffs. When you put everything into harware the perfromance is indeed great. The problems are that it takes much longer to design such chips. A minor bug in one small area can delay the whole product. The ideal is software programmable hardware. There is quite a bit of effort ongoing regarding configurable architectures with field-programmable logic. Currently such efforts seem to do well on DSP type apps as opposed to general purpose computers. In the multi-media area I tend to agree with you. Chromatic's efforts with Mpact to create a general purpose multi-media processor was doomed. Regards, Kash

To: Scumbria who wrote (47611)	1/27/1999 11:54:00 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1581723

Scumbria, another vision for computers is the DSP chip Intel vision=totally GP processor NSM=special purpose processors Analog Devices, Texas Instr.=programmable DSP DSP chips have occasionally been used in things like combo modem/sound cards, but haven't really caught on inside computers. Reduced product life cycle may eventually change that The same tradeoff between special purposs processors and programmable DSP's is also present in the cell phone industry, GPS receivers, digital radios and digital TV's. Petz