Intel MMX vs. Microsoft Talisman
Abbott and Costello Do Multimedia
Francis Vale
"Those who maintain that improvements in CPU and VLSI technology are sufficient to produce low cost hardware or even software (image processing & graphics) systems that we would consider high performance today, have not carefully analyzed the nature of the fundamental forces at work"
-- Microsoft, speaking on its new Talisman multimedia architecture, from the 1996 SIGGRAPH Proceedings.
"Processors enabled with MMX technology will deliver enough< performance to execute compute-intensive communications and multimedia tasks with headroom left to run other tasks or applications. They allow software developers to design richer, more exciting applications for the PC".
-- From Intel Corp.'s MMX Chip Overview.
So Who is on first? What's on second? I Don't Know is on third? If the techno-marketing issues for the next generation PC multimedia processing systems weren't so vitally important, the above computer replay of Abbot & Costello's classic comedy routine would make for a great TV farce. Unfortunately, also at stake in this looming new battle between Microsoft and Intel are billions of your IS/IT dollars--Not too mention the squishing mayonnaise effect it will have on software developers sandwiched between these two warring PC titans. Also caught in the middle are all the consumer electronics companies as they gear up for the great digital TV wars.
But to see how these bases got so crazily loaded, let's go back to this game's very beginning. Your Intel 8088 PC began its life as a very crude graphics-capable computer. Absolutely nothing about it--from CPU to memory bus--was meant to act like a high performance imaging system. This Grand Canyon-sized marketing gap left the business door wide open for other vendors, like Silicon Graphics, Intergraph, and Apollo Computer, to create high performance 2D/3D imaging, and CAD systems. These specialized computers invariably did not use Intel CPU's, nor MS operating systems. But over time, graphics capabilities were slowly introduced to the PC; first by clever software hacks, then with specialized chips, and finally, add-on graphics accelerator cards appeared. Then came more user demands for supporting high quality PC video and audio, essentially fueled by the advent of CD-ROMs. And finally, we have the Internet multimedia extravaganza.
But the problem was, no matter how many next iteration PC CPUs Intel cranked out, from the 8086 to the 32 bit Pentium Pro, user demands for imaging and multimedia were always several steps ahead of what the PC's processor could deliver. But these needs were not so easily met, for greatly compounding Intel's problems were the huge issues of applications/operating system backwards compatibility. This PC-Gordion Knot effectively precluded Intel from just chucking the whole '86 architecture, and starting out with a clean sheet of paper. Multimedia processing is thus a very sore point for Intel. Worse, it is typically done best and cheapest by DSPs, Digital Signal Processors. With its back against the multimedia wall, Intel was subsequently pushed into making a strategic marketing blunder.
In the summer of 1995, Intel mistakenly strayed onto Microsoft's fiercely protected API turf...
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