MMX technology - DVD

[A Blue Wolverine <kphan@engin.umich.edu>]

Hi all,
	I'm sure some of you have heard of Intel's MMX technology before, 
but I still want to bring this up 'cause it intrigues and fascinates me 
with all of it's potential.
	Well, MMX technology has been introduced for almost a year now 
but what do we know about it? I had the opportunity to attend a MMX 
Technology Demo conducted by Intel when they came to visit our campus 
(U. of Michigan) two days ago. The demo contained two parts, the first 
one had to do with presenting some fundamental and technological info. of 
how MMX chips differ from Pentium Pro counterparts, what improvements and 
changes 
have been made and what enhancements that we benefit from using MMX 
chips.....And the second part was a real demo. My understanding of MMX is 
quite rudimentary so what I learned from the seminar is this: 
	As the name indicates, MMX stands for Multi-Media-Extension (of course 
extension from Pentium Pro). MMX chips outperform Pentium Pro mainly 
in multimedia applications including videoconferencing and imaging. 
How does it handle it? well, again from my basic understanding, many 
images are stored in frames of at least 16  bits (usually 16 or 32 bits) 
and  MMX chips are equipped with special instruction codes so that they 
compress the images from >= 16-bit frames to 8-bit frames (just like zip 
and unzip in DOS). Also, a so-called  frame-grabber device is installed 
within the chips, this device will grab the next frame, somehow expand it 
and send it to the screen (this frame-grabber is also used in some of new  
Toshiba's PC models where we can watch TV right on a PC screen).    

	The second part was a demo, OK, here comes the fun and fascinating 
show. Some of us might have heard of DVD, right? The main idea of DVD is 
that some Hollywood studios have cooperated with some electronics 
companies to come up with DVD = Digital Video Disk. What they are doing 
is that they encrypt, write the movie content onto the compact disk which 
is called DVD and of the same size with a regular audio CD (this is 
analogous with CD_ROM encoding). The Intel people had two DVDs of "The 
Twister" and "The Fugitive" (which I'm sure most of you have seen these). 
They stuck one disk of a time into their PC's CD-driver and .......the show 
began. I didn't beleive in my eyes and ears......the image quality is so 
fine and perfect since a computer monitor has a very high resolution 
compared with a TV's screen.... and the sound is so live and crystal-clear 
with the implementations of all those newest technologies such as Dolby 
Surround Soudn, 3-D sound......The images are continously grabbed and 
pushed to the screen in such a fashion that you would not see any tiny 
gap between two image frames, absolutely no wavy images at all. In short, 
what we saw was a real movie, not some CD-ROM games that we play everyday.
	
	Well, I have exam tomorrow so I'll sign off now. Oh, I have a 
link to more info about DVD on the web on my homepage which is at:
	www-personal.engin.umich.edu/~kphan.
I'm sure DVD will really soon replace it's old brother magnetic video 
tape just like CD has knocked out cassette tape for years.

	Anyone knows anything about this topic, please bring it up, and 
also, please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere.....

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    ****    ****     *      Khanhtran N. Phan      *    ***  *    *   * ****
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