Future Of Computing

The increased use of multimedia in business

applications is driven primarily by the growth and maturity of Electronic Marketplaces

(EMs). EMs have come as an alternative to reach new customers and open new markets with

minimal increase in fixed and operational cost. During the next few years, as more goods

and services are purchased through EMs, customers will begin to expect immediate answers

to their queries regarding a product's price, availability, and shipping dates. If

customers are not happy with the responses they get, they will like to be presented with

immediate alternatives.

A new paradigm, e-business will enable the

execution of real-time business processes, both hard and soft transactions, with the

assistance of Internet technologies. What's behind the excitement over e-business is the

potential to re-evaluate and transform core business processes such as manufacturing,

marketing, sales, accounting, and customer service in light of Internet connectivity,

within a business, between businesses, and between businesses and consumers. Deploying

e-business systems is about removing geographic and time barriers; it's about streamlining

business processes to reduce overheads and increase the speed of execution. This will

allow companies to conduct virtual transactions and create new ways of delivering value

and service to customers. Most importantly, it's about gaining competitive advantage.

Ecommerce is not new. It has been around

for over 20 years. It originated in what is known as electronic data exchange. But due to

the exorbitant cost factor and the proprietary nature, its use remained confined to large

companies and financial institutions. This typically involved the batch or the bulk

transfer of data from one proprietary system to the other, and it required the use of

expensive, value-added proprietary networks. What is new is the pervading availability of

the Internet. It is this that promises to change the landscape and provide possibility of

a great equalizer for ecommerce. With the availability of the Internet, we see a

transition from ecommerce to Internet commerce. The other noticeable trend over the years

has been the growth of connected PCs. The process of networked PCs has been speeded up by

the pervasiveness of Internet, the international global universal network. It would not be

out of place to state that in the future all computing will be networked computing. And

that computing without becoming part of this global network, the Internet, will cease to

exist. A look at the number of PCs, at home and at businesses, with Internet connection

illustrates this. The numbers have been growing steadily and the projections indicate that

by the year 2000, 150 million PCs around the world will be connected through this network.

Given this, one can say, with reasonable assurance, that in the next decade we would see a

community of about a billion computers that will send and receive messages to and from all

other computers connected to this network. But again, in order to reach the benefits of

this connected universe, you have to be connected. This implies being connected in every

country and in every office and in as many homes as possible. Internet commerce, by

reducing the minimum economic scale required for the deployment of ecommerce, allows small

companies to become part of the electronic community. Besides, it allows for real-time

matching of buyers and sellers on the Internet. And consequently, it reduces the cost of

infrastructure and business processes involved.



The key benefit of ecommerce is twofold. On one hand, it reduces the cost of sales and
distribution for the sellers. And on the other, due to the ease with which one is able to

do shopping sitting in front of the computer screen-switching between several vendors,

evaluating various quotations-it turns buyers, both commercial and individual, into more

efficient purchasers.However, in order to do these from desktop, one needs PCs which are

powerful machines, since all of these will be visual computing. There will be more and

more screen-based computing and communication. Sufficient bandwidth to the PC to transfer

multimedia data is still a luxury. This data has to compressed to a size that can be

effectively transferred on the bandwidth available. All compression activity is

MIPS-intensive. The receiving PC has to decompress the information and also playback

content seamlessly. Enhanced multimedia software performance, requires not only good

processor performance but also platform performance. The general platform bottlenecks are

the throughput of the L2 cache and also the local bus performance (as shown in the

figure). This has been resolved with the implementation of DIB (Dual Independent Bus

architecture) as shown in the figure. Over the years we have seen local buses like ISA,

PCI, and the latest being AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port). PCI raised the performance of

the local bus to 132 Mbps, this was not enough because a number of devices like network

card, graphics card, and HDD card shared the same bus. This led to degradation of graphics

and video performance since the PCI bandwidth was not sufficient. There was need for a

dedicated bus to support the needs of high quality graphics performance. A consortium of

companies, of which Intel was a part, defined the AGP specification and established a new

standard to raise bar in graphics performance for the high-volume desktop PC.The new

platform with Pentium II processor and motherboard with support for AGP-enabled graphics

cards, will support business applications like video and data conferencing, 3D data

visualization, and good network throughput. These applications will change the paradigm of

doing business. Businesses which will hook their PCs on the Internet will be able to reach

a billion consumers and other businesses in a decade. I am sure that business will have

focussed strategies for this new geography. Today, with tens of millions of powerful,

Internet-ready PCs connecting businesses, the very fabric of business is being radically

transformed. With this, the way of carrying mundane tasks over the desktop too will

change. Moving back and forth from images, text, and sound while making business or

purchase decisions, and all in real time, will no longer seem difficult. It will simply

come to be accepted as 'the' way of doing business.

Shrikant Patil,



Multimedia Program Manager, Intel



India.