July 14, 1997, Montreal, Canada - New benchmarks announced today by Matrox show the added value of developing host-based applications using scientific/industrial software optimized for Intel MMX™ technology. Matrox continues its tradition as an innovator and leader in imaging with the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) version 5, the first scientific/industrial 'C' library optimized for Intel MMX™ technology. MIL 5.0 posts dramatic gains in speed when compared to non-optimized MIL code running on the same platform (see graphs and table below). All of the functions with the potential to benefit from Intel MMX™ technology were carefully hand-optimized in assembly language to yield these improvements. OEMs and integrators who use MIL 5.0 will now be able to more fully exploit the increasing power of PC processors, making host-based image processing suitable for an even greater selection of demanding machine vision, image analysis, and medical imaging applications.

MIL is a high-level 'C' library for fast application development, with an extensive set of hand-optimized commands for image processing (point-to-point, statistics, filtering, morphology and geometric transforms), pattern matching, blob analysis, gauging and OCR. MIL is a common API across Matrox's line of frame grabbers and image processors and runs on any VGA. Environments supported include Windows NT, Windows 95 and DOS4GW 32-bit DOS extender.

Although Intel MMX™ technology was designed to accelerate today's multimedia applications, the scientific/industrial world of image processing may prove to gain the most. Intel MMX™ technology addresses the key characteristics of applications that must manipulate large amounts of image, video and graphics data. It was built to more efficiently handle compute-intensive algorithms that perform repetitive operations on small data types, such as imaging algorithms, and the 8-bit pixels commonly used in all areas of image processing. Data is also manipulated in word (16-bit), double word (32-bit), and quad word (64-bit) format.

Although PC processors continue to increase in speed, some applications still require dedicated image processing hardware. Recognizing this, Matrox also offers an industry award-winning PCI image processor as well as frame grabbers to use with their software development tools. By coding with MIL, an OEM or integrator can run applications on the host or the Matrox Genesis DSP/ASIC-based family of image processors. Little or no rewriting of code is required to move applications across hardware. In addition, when reusing code on dedicated boards like Matrox Genesis, imaging operations are automatically accelerated using on-board processing resources.

* I/O bound operations

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