A number of widely used contemporary processors have instruction-set extensions for improved performance in multi-media applications. The aim is to allow operations to proceed on multiple pixels each clock cycle. Such instruction-sets have been incorporated both in specialist DSPchips such as the Texas C62xx (Texas Instruments, 1998) and in general purpose CPU chips like the Intel IA32 (Intel, 2000) or the AMD K6 (Advanced Micro Devices, 1999). These instruction-set extensions are typically based on the Single Instruc tion-stream Multiple Data-stream (SIMD) model in which a single instruction...

A number of widely used contemporary processors have instruction-set extensions for improved performance in multi-media applications. The aim is to allow operations to proceed on multiple pixels each clock cycle. Such instruction-sets have been incorporated both in specialist DSPchips such as the Texas C62xx (Texas Instruments, 1998) and in general purpose CPU chips like the Intel IA32 (Intel, 2000) or the AMD K6 (Advanced Micro Devices, 1999). These instruction-set extensions are typically based on the Single Instruc tion-stream Multiple Data-stream (SIMD) model in which a single instruction...

Computation and its Limits is an innovative cross-disciplinary investigation of the relationship between computing and physical reality. It begins by exploring the mystery of why mathematics is so effective in science and seeks to explain this in terms of the modelling of one part of physical reality by another. Going from the origins of counting to the most blue-skies proposals for novel methods of computation, the authors investigate the extent to which the laws of nature and of logic constrain what we can compute. In the process they examine formal computability, the thermodynamics of...

Computation and its Limits is an innovative cross-disciplinary investigation of the relationship between computing and physical reality. It begins by exploring the mystery of why mathematics is so effective in science and seeks to explain this in terms of the modelling of one part of physical reality by another. Going from the origins of counting to the most blue-skies proposals for novel methods of computation, the authors investigate the extent to which the laws of nature and of logic constrain what we can compute. In the process they examine formal computability, the thermodynamics of...