This is a truly great product.........
But it's not quite ready for consumer prime time:
<<Today's DVx codec, packed with 5.5 million transistors, is as big as the Pentium II,
according to Saffari. In the encode mode, power dissipation is between 3.5 and 4 W.
By moving to 0.25-micron and, later, to 0.18-micron process technologies as they
become available, "Our goal is to optimize the memory utilization and reduce the
power consumption to 1 to 2 W as a codec," Saffari said. "For camcorder design
wins, it's necessary to bring it down to 1.2 to 0.7 W."
C-Cube CEO Balkanski believes that "we are only a generation away" from making
consumer applications possible. The company expects that by 1999, the single-chip
codec will cost less than $50. Today's version runs $1,500, but that includes all the
microcode needed to build a professional broadcast encoder system. >> |
