The really revolutionary thing about P-III's (the reactionary thing being the hardware ID) is that they have hardware NURBS instructions on the chip. NURBS are non-uniform rational B-splines. Intel's betting that someone will come up with a NURBS-based graphics format for the web--Adobe Illustrator, and to an extant PostScript, already use B-splines, which could be rendered with the same instructions. Then, of course, only people with P-IIIs will be able to view those graphics reasonably quickly.
As soon as I have the money I'll cough up for one, though. A lot of buck for the bang, sure, but hardware NURBS support will be a huge help for high-quality 3D imaging, and the CGI landscape will look a lot different once 3DNow! and NURBS have been incorporated into all Intel clones. I'd love to write a program using the NURBS instructions for a senior project!
P.S. Don't let Intel make you think they invented NURBS--the paper was published in the 80s.
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The really revolutionary thing about P-III's (the reactionary thing being the hardware ID) is that they have hardware NURBS instructions on the chip. NURBS are non-uniform rational B-splines. Intel's betting that someone will come up with a NURBS-based graphics format for the web--Adobe Illustrator, and to an extant PostScript, already use B-splines, which could be rendered with the same instructions. Then, of course, only people with P-IIIs will be able to view those graphics reasonably quickly.
As soon as I have the money I'll cough up for one, though. A lot of buck for the bang, sure, but hardware NURBS support will be a huge help for high-quality 3D imaging, and the CGI landscape will look a lot different once 3DNow! and NURBS have been incorporated into all Intel clones. I'd love to write a program using the NURBS instructions for a senior project!
P.S. Don't let Intel make you think they invented NURBS--the paper was published in the 80s.