Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, says it will provide the muscle. In 15 years, one PC will be as robust as 250 PCs linked together today, Grove says. To that end, Intel is extending its tentacles into almost anything that improves the PC experience. It has dispatched high-level executives to scour Hollywood for people to produce blockbuster content for the World Wide Web. MMX, with its jazzed-up multimedia performance, is the first major change in 11 years to Intel's chip instruction set.
Instruction sets tell microprocessors how to work.
One of Intel's biggest concerns is that consumers won't want PCs because it takes too long to get data from the Web over regular telephone lines. To counter the fact that high-speed networks are decades away, Intel is pushing developers to create hybrid software. Such software creates the illusion of fast connections. He then connects to the Internet to get the latest prices and talk to a sales clerk. Because only a small amount of information needs to be downloaded, the data flows faster than if he were downloading the entire catalog each time he shopped.