Chromatic Research
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Chromatic Research
Chromatic Research Inc. was a company based in Mountain View, California that developed a multifunction multimedia device for PCs called the MPACT! The company was formerly known as Xenon Microsystems Corporation. Chromatic Research, Inc. was founded in 1993. The founders came from Kubota, Showgraphics, Convex and RAMBUS. The hardware technology for the MPACT! was a programmable VLIW and SIMD media processor that implemented a video, audio and modem device. The purpose of the solution was to be a single chip or add-in card that removed the need for separate graphics, audio and modem devices. The MPACT briefly sold as a fully functioning add in card and as a DVD decoder solution. The MPACT! The architecture of the MPACT! media processor was distinguished in that it used a large addressable SRAM in place of registers, but had 4 special purpose registers for being able to address its 72 bit SRAM entries indirectly (a feature also seen in Intel's Itanium processor). By being base ...
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Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, it has a population of 82,376. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies. In 1956, William Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices in Silicon Valley. Today, Mountain View houses the headquarters of many of the world's largest technology companies, including Google and Alphabet Inc., Unicode Consortium, Intuit, NASA Ames research center, and major headquarter offices for Microsoft, NortonLifeLock, Symantec, 23andMe, LinkedIn, Samsung, and Synopsys. History The Mexican land grant of Rancho Pastoria de las Borregas was given in 1842 by Alta California Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado, Juan Alvarado to Francisco Estrada. This grant was later passed on to Mariano Castro, who sold ...
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Itanium
Itanium ( ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Launched in June 2001, Intel marketed the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly developed by HP and Intel. Itanium-based systems were produced by HP/Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) (the HPE Integrity Servers line) and several other manufacturers. In 2008, Itanium was the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, Power ISA, and SPARC. In February 2017, Intel released the final generation, Kittson, to test customers, and in May began shipping in volume. It was used exclusively in mission-critical servers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. In 2019, Intel announced that new orders for Itanium would be accepted until January 30, 2020, and shipments would cease by July 29, 2021 ...
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Personal Computer
A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large, costly minicomputers and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers. Primarily in the late 1970s and 1980s, the term home computer was also used. Institutional or corporate computer owners in the 1960s had to write their own programs to do any useful work with the machines. While personal computer users may develop their own applications, usually these systems run commercial software, free-of-charge software ("freeware"), which is most often proprietary, or free and open-source software, which is provided in "ready-to-run", or binary, form. Software for personal computers is typically developed and distributed independently from the hardware or operating system ma ...
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X86 Instruction Listings
The x86 instruction set refers to the set of instructions that x86-compatible microprocessors support. The instructions are usually part of an executable program, often stored as a computer file and executed on the processor. The x86 instruction set has been extended several times, introducing wider registers and datatypes as well as new functionality. x86 integer instructions Below is the full 8086/8088 instruction set of Intel (81 instructions total). Most if not all of these instructions are available in 32-bit mode; they just operate on 32-bit registers (eax, ebx, etc.) and values instead of their 16-bit (ax, bx, etc.) counterparts. The updated instruction set is also grouped according to architecture (i386, i486, i686) and more generally is referred to as (32-bit) x86 and (64-bit) x86-64 (also known as AMD64). Original 8086/8088 instructions Added in specific Intel processors Added with 80186/ 80188 Added with 80286 Added with 80386 Compared to ea ...
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MMX (instruction Set)
MMX is a ''single instruction, multiple data'' (SIMD) instruction set architecture designed by Intel, introduced on January 8, 1997 with its Pentium P5 (microarchitecture) based line of microprocessors, named "Pentium with MMX Technology". It developed out of a similar unit introduced on the Intel i860, and earlier the Intel i750 video pixel processor. MMX is a processor supplementary capability that is supported on IA-32 processors by Intel and other vendors . The New York Times described the initial push, including Super Bowl advertisements, as focused on "a new generation of glitzy multimedia products, including videophones and 3-D video games." MMX has subsequently been extended by several programs by Intel and others: 3DNow!, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), and ongoing revisions of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). Overview Naming MMX is officially a meaningless initialism trademarked by Intel; unofficially, the initials have been variously explained as standing for * ...
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MPEG
The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio compression (data), audio, video compression, video, graphics, and Compression of Genomic Sequencing Data, genomic data; and transmission and Container format (digital), file formats for various applications.John Watkinson, ''The MPEG Handbook'', p. 1 Together with Joint Photographic Experts Group, JPEG, MPEG is organized under ISO/IEC JTC 1/ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29, SC 29 – ''Coding of audio, picture, multimedia and hypermedia information'' (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 29). MPEG formats are used in various multimedia systems. The most well known older MPEG media formats typically use MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 AVC media coding and MPEG-2 systems MPEG transport stream, transport streams an ...
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Modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulation methods, modulating one or more carrier wave signals to encode digital information, while the receiver Demodulation, demodulates the signal to recreate the original digital information. The goal is to produce a Signal (electronics), signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded reliably. Modems can be used with almost any means of transmitting analog signals, from light-emitting diodes to radio. Early modems were devices that used audible sounds suitable for transmission over traditional telephone systems and leased lines. These generally operated at 110 or 300 bits per second (bit/s), and the connection between devices was normally manual, using an attached telephone handset. By the 1970s, higher speeds of 1,200 and 2,400  ...
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Codec
A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or data stream, and hence is a type of codec. ''Endec'' is a portmanteau of encoder/decoder. A coder or encoder encodes a data stream or a signal for transmission or storage, possibly in encrypted form, and the decoder function reverses the encoding for playback or editing. Codecs are used in videoconferencing, streaming media, and video editing applications. History In the mid-20th century, a codec was a device that coded analog signals into digital form using pulse-code modulation (PCM). Later, the name was also applied to software for converting between digital signal formats, including companding functions. Examples An audio codec converts analog audio signals into digital signals for transmission or encodes them for storage. A receiv ...
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Computer Software
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists of machine language instructions supported by an individual processor—typically a central processing unit (CPU) or a graphics processing unit (GPU). Machine language consists of groups of binary values signifying processor instructions that change the state of the computer from its preceding state. For example, an instruction may change the value stored in a particular storage location in the computer—an effect that is not directly observable to the user. An instruction may also invoke one of many input or output operations, for example displaying some text on a computer screen; causing state changes which should be visible to the user. The processor executes the instructions in the order they are provided, unless it is instructed ...
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Digital-to-analog Converter
In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function. There are several DAC architectures; the suitability of a DAC for a particular application is determined by figures of merit including: resolution, maximum sampling frequency and others. Digital-to-analog conversion can degrade a signal, so a DAC should be specified that has insignificant errors in terms of the application. DACs are commonly used in music players to convert digital data streams into analog audio signals. They are also used in televisions and mobile phones to convert digital video data into analog video signals. These two applications use DACs at opposite ends of the frequency/resolution trade-off. The audio DAC is a low-frequency, high-resolution type while the video DAC is a high-frequency low- to medium-resolution type. Due to the complexity a ...
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Arithmetic Logic Unit
In computing, an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) is a Combinational logic, combinational digital circuit that performs arithmetic and bitwise operations on integer binary numbers. This is in contrast to a floating-point unit (FPU), which operates on floating point numbers. It is a fundamental building block of many types of computing circuits, including the central processing unit (CPU) of computers, FPUs, and graphics processing units (GPUs). The inputs to an ALU are the data to be operated on, called operands, and a code indicating the operation to be performed; the ALU's output is the result of the performed operation. In many designs, the ALU also has status inputs or outputs, or both, which convey information about a previous operation or the current operation, respectively, between the ALU and external status registers. Signals An ALU has a variety of input and output net (electronics), nets, which are the electrical conductors used to convey Digital signal (electronics), digi ...
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Direct Memory Access
Direct memory access (DMA) is a feature of computer systems and allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the central processing unit (CPU). Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is typically fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation, and is thus unavailable to perform other work. With DMA, the CPU first initiates the transfer, then it does other operations while the transfer is in progress, and it finally receives an interrupt from the DMA controller (DMAC) when the operation is done. This feature is useful at any time that the CPU cannot keep up with the rate of data transfer, or when the CPU needs to perform work while waiting for a relatively slow I/O data transfer. Many hardware systems use DMA, including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards and sound cards. DMA is also used for intra-chip data transfer in multi-core processors. Computers that have DMA channels can trans ...
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