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Often, these companies support operating system software and compilers that make par-
titioning and hosting an application much simpler. COMPUTER HARDWARE 85
Here are a couple of URLs for further study on parallel processing:
www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/dbpp/text/book.html
www.afm.sbu.ac.uk/transputer/

Digital Signal Processing (DSP)

DSP chips are basically special-purpose processors designed to serve a particular class
of computational problems. The central feature common to most DSP chips is a MAC,
which stands for Multiply and Accumulate. And no, sorry, this has nothing to do with
having lots of kids and living in a small house!
DSP processors are specifically designed to rapidly multiply two numbers together
and add them to a third (accumulate). Several types of arithmetic problems are well
served by such a processor:
Taylor series In 1712, mathematician Brook Taylor (see Figure 3-6) wrote a for-
mula that can be used to approximate a function. Where f(x) is a function (with
certain continuity restrictions) and f (x) is the nth derivative of f(x) with respect
n
to x, then f(x) can be approximated in the vicinity of x a by the formula
2
n
n
1
2
f 1x2 f 1a2 f 1a2 1x a2 f 1a2 1x a2 >2! ... f 1a2 1x a2 >n!

FIGURE 3-6 Brook Taylor