Chips wars rage on

摘要

The end of the 1990s saw things literally hotting up inside PCs as a plethora of new processors burst onto the market. Sporting an enormous heatsink, Intel's PHI expanded on the power of its predecessor with a set of 70 new instructions, codenamed Katmai. Like MMX, these were designed specifically to help with multimedia applications. Improved floating point maths functions were ideal for MPEG video work, MP3 audio encoding and improving 3D graphics performance.