| Q: | What is AMD's 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | 3DNow!™ technology is the first innovation to the x86 processor architecture that significantly enhances floating-point-intensive, 3D graphics and multimedia performance for today's mainstream Microsoft Windows compatible personal computers. Benefits of 3DNow! technology include leading-edge 3D performance, more realistic and lifelike 3D imaging and graphics, big screen sound and video, and the ultimate Internet experience. |
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| Q: | What are the benefits of 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | 3DNow!™ technology is a significant innovation to the x86 architecture that drives today's personal computers. Technically, 3DNow! technology is a group of instructions that open the traditional processing bottlenecks for floating-point-intensive 3D and multimedia applications. With 3DNow! technology users can implement more powerful hardware and software solutions to enable a richer visual computing experience. Examples include fast frame rates on high-resolution scenes, improved physical modeling of real-world environments, more objects with accurate physical characteristics displayed at lifelike speeds, sharp and more detailed 3D imaging, smooth video playback, and near theatre-quality audio. |
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| Q: | Why does the industry need another new x86 CPU instruction set to accelerate 3D graphics? Why not do it all with 3D graphics accelerators?
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| A: | To enable the highest level of 3D-multimedia performance, today's PCs require innovative technologies from both the 3D graphics accelerator and the host CPU. Consider the 3D graphics-processing pipeline. It begins with 3D physical modeling and geometry transformations, lighting, and clipping, which are floating-point-intensive. It ends with integer-intensive rendering, which is done primarily by 3D graphics accelerator cards.
Today's graphics accelerators are improving so quickly that the CPU cannot always provide data fast enough. The result is a bottleneck; 3D graphics performance is limited by the earlier floating-point-intensive stages of the graphics pipeline. 3DNow!™ technology relieves the bottleneck by accelerating the floating-point and other calculations that occur early in the pipeline. Ultimately, 3DNow! technology and the 3D graphics accelerators complement one another.
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| Q: | How are MMX™ and 3DNow!™ technology different?
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| A: | MMX™ technology was developed to improve the integer-intensive operations used in 3D rendering at the back end of the graphics pipeline. However, by the time MMX technology reached the market, 3D graphics accelerator performance had outpaced most of what MMX could do. While MMX technology can enhance integer-intensive applications, today's state-of-the-art graphics accelerators provide an optimal performance boost for 3D rendering. 3DNow!™ technology complements and enhances the performance of these accelerator products by speeding up the floating-point-intensive, front-end stages of the graphics pipeline. |
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| Q: | Is 3DNow!™ technology only applicable to games?
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| A: | 3DNow!™ technology has enhanced the performance of many non-gaming titles. For example, IBM's ViaVoice uses 3DNow! technology support to implement faster voice recognition algorithms. LiveArt 98 support for 3DNow! technology provides faster, smoother graphics and higher-quality 3D images for business presentations. Another non-gaming area in which 3DNow! technology provides benefit is in DVD playback. 3DNow! technology reduces the processor bandwidth required to decode the sound tracks on a DVD player by up to 50%. 3DNow! technology works so well with Dolby's AC-3 (digital surround-sound) that Dolby Europe now demonstrates their software on systems powered by AMD processors. |
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| Q: | What applications stand to benefit from 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | In addition to accelerating 3D games, the 3DNow!™ technology enhances the performance of 3D edutainment software, business productivity software, CAD/CAE viewers, 3D audio processing, speech recognition software, 3D imaging software, soft modems, soft DVD, MPEG2 video playback, and AC-3. 3DNow! technology has been used to increase the speech recognition algorithms in IBM's ViaVoice and process digital sound algorithms with less CPU utilization in Rave Karaoke, Winamp, and Dolby AC-3 playback. |
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| Q: | Is there any support in Windows 98 or Windows NT for 3DNow!™ technology?
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| A: | Unlike other SIMD (single instruction multiple data) technologies, 3DNow!™ technology does not require operating system changes. It is supported now in Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0 |
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| Q: | How many 3DNow!™ floating-point results are there per clock?
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| A: | The short answer is up to four. Much of the 3D performance boost from 3DNow!™ technology stems from its use of SIMD. Each instruction not only operates on two single-precision floating-point operands, but the AMD-K6 -2 microarchitecture can execute up to two 3D instructions per clock through two register execution pipelines. This allows for four floating-point calculations (adds, subtracts, multiples) per clock cycle. |
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| Q: | What 3DNow!™ technology enhancements have been implemented in the AMD Athlon™ processor?
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| A: | The AMD Athlon™ processor includes specific enhancements to the 3DNow!™ instruction set. The enhanced 3DNow! technology implemented in the AMD Athlon takes 3D multimedia performance to new heights and builds on the 21 instructions of AMD?s original 3DNow! technology - the first x86 instruction set to use superscalar SIMD floating-point techniques. Enhanced 3DNow! adds 24 new instructions - 19 to improve MMX™ integer math calculations and enhance data movement for Internet streaming applications and 5 DSP extensions for soft modem, soft ADSL, Dolby Digital, and MP3 applications. This new DSP functionality of the AMD Athlon is not supported by the Pentium III. |
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| Q: | What level of performance will the AMD Athlon™ processor deliver?
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| A: | The AMD Athlon™ processor is designed to set a new performance standard for x86 processors, delivering the highest available x86 performance for software applications. The AMD Athlon processor delivers integer, floating-point, and multimedia performance that is superior to any competing x86 processor. |
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创新的微处理器、闪存和低功耗处理器解决方案
