Media processor architectures from Equator....................
eet.com
Posted: 3:00 p.m., EDT, 8/21/98
Equator takes software-first tack on VLIW
By Stephan Ohr
SEATTLE - Equator Technology Inc. is
developing programmable processor architectures
that will add multimedia features to computers and
consumer electronics, and it expects to accomplish
its work almost entirely in software.
The company hopes its work will find use in
high-definition TVs, set-top boxes and interactive
3-D games. Equator is already touting partnerships
with a number of high-profile companies: Hitachi
on HDTV; Criterion in 3-D rendering algorithms;
and with Microsoft on Talisman frameworks and
an API for DSP.
"We'll do an HDTV in C - fully in software," said
John O'Donnell, president of Equator, based here.
The micro-architectures Equator spins out - in
effect, VLIW ASICs - will be specifically
designed to execute this code.
Equator's embrace of VLIW (very-long instruction
word) technology might seem a bold move in light
of Chromatic Research's retreat from the
technology. The media-processor pioneer has
apparently given up its quest to harness VLIW
architectures to the needs of multimedia. And
Philips' TriMedia group, another media-processor
developer, has scaled back the applications of its
products to HDTV decoding and
videoconferencing.
Chromatic and Philips have approached DSP
multimedia from the wrong direction, O'Donnell
said. Instead of developing a big general-purpose
hardware architecture, and then attempting to get
programs to run on it, Equator is developing the
software first - and then finding the most efficient
hardware to run it.
Equator has extensive expertise with VLIW
compilers. O'Donnell was a principal in Multiflow
Computer Corp., one of the first
minisupercomputer makers to exploit
very-long-instruction-word architecture in the
1980s.
The company sees its VLIW-based media
processor as something of an application-specific
standard part. It will likely show small variations in
hardware from application to application, and large
variations in software.
Equator's VLIW compiler would allow program
developers to do their work in C, and to still get
fast performance on a variety of these new
microarchitectures. Programmers, O'Donnell said,
have become used to the notion that they either
need to develop their programs in assembly
language, or use a power-hungry processor to get
speedy execution on less-efficient programs
developed in C. "In terms of productivity, the more
we can keep them in C, the better off we'll be."
Equator's compiler can tailor the program to a
variety of efficient microarchitectures, rather than to
a large VLIW machine whose performance may
still depend on code that is hand-tweaked in
assembly.
"VLIW has a good future," said Will Strauss, who
tracks DSPs for Forward Concepts (Tempe,
Ariz.). |
