EDN -- 06.06.96 Editorial

Conspiracy theories June 6, 1996

Steven H. Leibson
, Editor in Chief

High-tech-conspiracy theories drive me nuts. You've certainly heard many of these theories. Usually, they at-tribute a company's technical in-novation to some egotistical corporate desire to rule the world. Thus, IBM supposedly developed the Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) bus to destroy the market for ISA-bus PCs. Recall that, back in the late '80, the dozens of mutually incompatible interpretations of the original IBM PC and PC/AT buses didn't have the convenient and fraudulent "unifying" nomenclature ISA. They were simply a bunch of somewhat-compatible versions of IBM's PC buses. It's just possible that IBM's engineers developed MCA in an attempt to create a more controlled bus architecture without quite so many "funnies."

Similarly, people often attribute evil ulterior motives to Intel, the semiconductor company that seemingly everyone loves to hate. Now, I'm not about to discuss Intel's marketing style, that's not what EDN's about. But I draw the line when it comes to saddling innovative engineering with these human characteristics from the dark side of the psyche.

Take MMX, Intel's multimedia instruction-set extension for x86 µPs, for example. MMX is Intel's latest incarnation of native-signal processing (NSP). With the increasing use of modems, audio, and video in PCs, signal processing in all of its forms has become a very important task for PCs to perform. PC developers previously assigned these tasks to separate DSPs, because even the fastest host CPUs bog down when performing real-time signal processing. MMX-enhanced Pentiums and Pentium Pros will be more efficient signal processors.

Some see MMX technology as Intel's forked assault on other x86 µP vendors (whose products won't have MMX extensions) and DSP vendors. Instead of conspiracy, I see a company trying to provide more value to its customers by creating technology that lowers the overall cost of a system. Host µPs with MMX instructions might be good enough for many applications, but they still won't be able to perform as well as dedicated DSPs.

For you lovers of conspiracy explanations, I remind you that Intel's NSP died a horrible death in its first incarnation because Microsoft, another company high up on industry-conspiracy-theory lists, would not support it. Nothing guarantees MMX success, either. I guess not all conspiracies succeed.

Steven H. Leibson
Editor In Chief