1-8-96

Digital is shipping today a new addition 
to the HiNote VP500 family of Notebook 
computers.  This new Notebook is the VP545 
and will be available in early January 1997.  
This addition will show Digital's commitment 
to leading edge technology by jointly 
announcing with Intel the introduction of 
the MMX processor and the HiNote VP545.

The VP545 will be identical to the VP535 
except it will have a Pentium 150 MMX CPU 
instead of the 133 Pentium.

Following is an overview of MMX and how it 
will affect you:

Intel is addressing user's continuous need for 
more processing power by introducing the MMX.  
The new MMX chip has Fifty Seven new instructions 
which accelerate calculations common in audio, 2D
and 3D graphics, video, speech synthesis and 
recognition.  

MMX is designed to have no impact on the operating 
system, making it compatible with existing x86 
based OSs.  Digital has also thoroughly regression 
tested our new MMX laptop to ensure that there will 
be no compatibility problems with operating systems 
or peripherals.  All PCMCIA cards and memory which 
are qualified to run on the VP500 series are also 
qualified for the VP545.  

First, note that not all applications will benefit 
from MMX.  The applications that benefit most, tend 
to be multimedia and communications software with 
kinds of repetitive compute-intensive loops where 
the data can be organized to be processed in parallel.
Second, software must be optimized for MMX in order 
for the new instructions to be most effective.  In 
fact current industry benchmarks do not measure 
improvements of this type.