Intel placed in electronics magazines articles expounding the microprocessors' capabilities and proselytized engineering organizations and companies in the hope that others would come up with applications.
But these chips should respond to Moore's Law, the computer-industry guideline that says a microprocessor's capability will double, and the price halve, every 18 months.
These various devices -- game systems, audio centers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders -- have four common attributes: a microprocessor, networking capability, a graphical user interface and a huge hard drive.
And you can embed all sorts of advanced sensor functionality, microprocessor, computing capability, radios, power supplies, into this very unusual platform, and that's the uniqueness of what we do.
But they pointed to financial documents that detail the company's product directions, indicating that it plans to match other future capabilities outlined by Intel today, including microprocessors capable of one-gigahertz speeds for portable computers, or roughly twice the processing power of the chip it demonstrated today.
It would be a kind of optical network to ferry data around the microprocessor, boosting its capabilities in the same way fiber optics have transformed telecommunications.
The 760XD has a 166-megahertz Pentium microprocessor with MMX multimedia capabilities.
That's one of the visions that inspired a team at the University of California, Berkeley, to design a new microprocessor that puts the capabilities of chips found in game consoles and personal computers into battery-powered handheld devices.
It is a sophisticated handheld video game machine containing a 32-bit microprocessor, 16-bit graphics capabilities, and stereo digital sound, though it is small enough to fit in pocket.
Moreover, thanks to a SOM design enhancing a full compatibility among solutions exploiting the same microprocessor architecture, multi-core capabilities can be easily exploited (i.e., a new SOM with the same pinout and embedding a microprocessor with a greater number of cores can work in a plug&play manner).
