At his Comdex '94 keynote Intel Corp. president and chief executive officer Andrew Grove has called for the standardization of multimedia and communications subsystems for PCs. Intel realizes that upgrading PCs for multimedia with add-in boards creates complexities for the industry. Grove stated, ``Each application ends up tied to its own hardware system, resulting in added expense and complexity for installation support.''
Intel is proposing `Native Signal Processing' (NSP), as a technique that uses spare compute cycles on the main processor to perform functions traditionally assigned to add-in cards with digital-signal processors.
Later, representatives of AMD, AT&T, Motorola all stated that Intel's NSP iniative must be resisted at all costs. AT&T Microelectronics' Curtis Crawford has said at the In-Stat conference ``I am not certain that it is in the best interest of the industry or our customers to allow everything worth doing to be done only on the microprocessor.'' There are similar statements from the other DSP producers.
Both Intel and the discrete DSP producers cannot be right.
The claim is YES if the bulk of P6- and P7-based systems are seen to use the NSP architecture as defined by Intel. The affirmation of the claim will be judged by the preponderance of the opinion of the media pundits. As necessary the opinions of market researchers (e.g. DataQuest) or industry opinion editors (in the trade press) will be invoked for the judgement.
Background: You may do your own research on the goings-on in the trade at TechWeb
In addition to NSP you may wish to understand Intel's 3DR project. Intel is giving away the 3DR Geometry Engine pipeline for free (and allowing its royalty-free use in products). Intel promises to support 3DR. The 3DR effort can be seen to bolster the need for more and better CPUs -- and thus the NSP architecture.
The background for this claim are the various industry trade press articles describing the pros, cons, foibles and advantages of NSP. A selection follows:
I will judge based on the wording of the claim unless it is found to be ambiguous. Such ambiguities will be resolved based on my perception of the author's intent.
