Sigma pressing for Video bi-pass of the CPU. They need AC3 on chip to do this. If Video & sound are off the CPU, software decoding is not an option......................................
techweb.com
Vendors Fight Over PC Video-Processing
(11/11/98 12:14 p.m. ET)
By John Gartner, TechWeb
As signs that the battle over how and where PCs will produce high-quality video is heating up, Sigma Designs, a leading MPEG vendor, has proposed an alternative to recent Intel initiatives for centralizing video-processing.
Sigma Designs is searching for a partner to create a hybrid networking/video adapter that would bypass the CPU for video-processing, according to a company official who asked not to be named.
The proposed product, a combined MPEG-2 decoder and LAN adapter, would be the first to bring video from a network directly to an MPEG decoder chip. Now, video streamed from a network is passed by the CPU across the system bus to a video card, then decompressed and sent to the display.
The Sigma executive said a hybrid product would allow broadcast-quality video to run in a window while leaving enough CPU power to run other applications uninterrupted. He added connecting the chips that process incoming video to those that decompress it lowers the overall cost of the system.
"We're working toward 0 percent CPU utilization," he said.
The move makes sense, said Mike Feibus, principal at graphics analyst company Mercury Research. But combining networking and video playback functions in a single card could lead to "clashes with Intel, which wants to keep all the instructions on the host."
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel is building video- and image-optimization instructions into its Katmai processors, scheduled to start shipping in the first half of next year. The chip maker has promoted its Pentium II processors as capable of playing back MPEG-2 video without additional hardware, a process known as software MPEG or DVD playback. MPEG-2 is a widely adopted standard used by DVD players that provides broadcast quality video at 30 frames per second.
Feibus said software-based video playback requires the majority of a CPU's processing power. "Software DVD is fine if watching a movie is all you're doing," he said.
Sigma's NetStream 2 PCI card is now used by organizations with high-speed networks, but to serve the consumer market, Sigma is considering bundling MPEG decoders into consumer products such as ADSL or cable modems, for video-on-demand and distance learning.
The paradox of the market right now, Feibus said, is though consumer applications exist, few people have the bandwidth to support them. Corporations, which do have the bandwidth, don't have the applications.
MPEG-2 is impractical on the Internet now because most home-user and corporate connections are much slower than the 3 megabits per second of bandwidth required, said Jim Nielsen, vice president of marketing at FVC.com, a maker of MPEG-2 broadcast products.
FVC is working on new video broadcast technologies and will release version 2.0 of its V-locator gateway that lets users access video conferences, clips, and channels stored on the Internet using a Web browser. The LAN product hides the data-stream type from users and translates the source to an acceptable format.
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