PC MAKERS REEL OUT HIGH-TECH LURES : INTEL RELEASES UPGRADED PROCESSOR.Byline: Catalina Ortiz Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency. Associated Press (AP) Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world. Intel Corp. and the best-known makers of personal computers launched technology Wednesday they hope will put consumers back in the buying mood. Machines equipped with the new Intel Pentium MMX A Pentium CPU with added instructions for improved multimedia performance. See MMX and Pentium. chips were shown off with promises of substantially improved graphics, video, sound and communications. The Intel microprocessors For a list of Intel's microcontrollers, see . This generational and chronological list of Intel microprocessors attempts to present all of Intel's processors from the pioneering 4-bit 4004 (1971) to the present high-end offerings, the 64-bit Itanium 2 (2002) and Intel with the new technology will run existing programs 10 percent to 20 percent faster than previous processors, the company said. Programs written to take advantage of the new chip should run 60 times faster. This means improvements in a wide variety of programs, including photo and video editing, 3-D graphics, animation and games, Intel said. ``Our whole goal here is to deliver a new level of performance, a new level of capability to the consumer,'' said Mike Aymar, vice president of Intel's desktop products group. The PC industry hopes to get a boost from the new chip and snazzy snaz·zy adj. snaz·zi·er, snaz·zi·est Slang Fashionable or flashy. [Origin unknown.] snaz new software written for it. Personal computers did not sell as well over the holiday season as manufacturers and retailers hoped. Industry observers think some consumers interested in buying PCs held off purchases knowing that computers with the MMX (MultiMedia EXtensions) A set of 57 additional instructions built into the Pentium MMX chip for improved multimedia and modem performance by performing mathematical operations on multiple sets of data at the same time (see SIMD). chip would be available this month. Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Dataquest Inc. of San Jose, said the new processor also demonstrates what Intel - and the rest of the PC industry - must do to keep growing: Make computers more relevant to the average person. Among the companies announcing new computers with MMX chips were: Acer, Compaq, Dell, Digital, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) , Packard Bell, Sony and Toshiba. Manufacturers offering new software are Adobe, Macromedia, MetaTools, Microsoft, Netscape and Sega. CAPTION(S): Photo Photo: (color) no caption (Pentium MMX chips) |
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