New CPUs Signal Better Multimedia PCs

Tom R. Halfhill

Talk about strange bedfellows. Former blood enemies Intel (Santa Clara, CA) and Advanced Micro Devices (Sunnyvale, CA) have signed a landmark cross-licensing agreement that will allow them to introduce CPUs with new multimedia x86 instructions by the end of this year. Frozen out, however, is Cyrix (Richardson, TX) and its manufacturing partner, IBM Microelectronics (Fishkill, NY).

The surprising detente between the two leading x86 vendors could be the most significant step in the evolution of the x86 since Intel introduced the 32-bit 386 in 1985. Intel and AMD plan to make new x86 chips that recognize the same set of extended instructions for multimedia tasks. This technology, known as MMx, is supposed to dramatically improv e the ability of x86 chips to process audio, video, and other multimedia data types.

The cross-licensing agreement ensures that Intel's and AMD's multimedia processors will be fully compatible with each other. Without the deal, each company might have introduced its own proprietary extensions. That would have forced software developers to support only one company's new instructions (most likely Intel's) or everybody's new instructions--a wasteful and potentially chaotic situation for both developers and users.

At this writing, there is no indicat ion from either Intel or Cyrix that a licensing deal is pending. If Cyrix must resort to reverse engineering, the extra effort could seriously delay Cyrix's multimedia CPUs. IBM suffers, too, because IBM licenses its latest x86 designs from Cyrix. But according to Steve Tobak, vice president of corporate marketing for Cyrix, reverse engineering may not be necessary.

"There are talks with Intel," Tobak says. "I can't say anything more about it, except that we have always been capable of producing processors that are x86 software-compatible, and we don't expect that to change."

NexGen (Milpitas, CA), a much smaller x86 vendor, was acquired by AMD last year and is covered by AMD's contract with Intel. NexGen's latest CPU, originally known as the Nx686 but now called the AMD K6, already incorporates a special multimedia unit for extended instructions. NexGen engineers are modifying the design to make it compatible with the MMx specifications. (See "AMD K6 Takes On Intel P6," January BYTE.)

Intel predicts the MMx-enabled Pentium (code-named P55C) will ship in large volumes in the fourth quarter. MMx versions of the Pentium Pro will probably follow in 1997. Intel will manufacture motherboards, primarily for the home market, that include special support for MMx processors, the company says. PCs based on those motherboards will be able to capture and compress video in real time and will have video outputs for TVs and VCRs. They'll also have universal serial bus (USB) ports, a new I/O standard backed by Intel and Microsoft.