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Strategies & Market Trends : Piffer OT - And Other Assorted Nuts -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Junkyardawg who wrote (19244)	2/21/2000 11:49:00 PM
From: Junkyardawg	Respond to of 63513

From the Wall Street Journalcopied from the SI TXN thread. Texas Instruments Says New Processor Is 10 Times Faster Than Current Model By EVAN RAMSTAD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Texas Instruments Inc. will unveil its next generation of digital-signal processor chips Tuesday and claim performance improvements exceeding the expectations of industry observers. While digital-signal processors, or DSPs, are subject to the same semiannual doubling of performance that other computer chips are, the company is capitalizing on improved factory processes and software design to give its new chips an extra boost. The Dallas company is the largest maker of DSPs, the critical chip inside wireless phones, computer hard drives, digital cameras and other devices. Many customers and analysts had been expecting TI to update its flagship C6x DSPs, used in cellular-phone-tower transmitters and other high-performance applications. But TI will also announce a new generation of the C5x DSP, the low-power chips used in products such as portable audio devices for which energy consumption is important. "Nobody expected them to do two major parts at once," says Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts in Tempe, Ariz., a research firm specializing in DSPs and related chip markets. TI says the new C64 line of DSPs is 10 times speedier than the three-year-old C62 line it replaces. Meanwhile, its new C55 DSP consumes six times less power per processing unit than its predecessor chip did. In simplest terms, that would allow the battery of a phone using the new low-power chip to run six times longer than one using the previous DSP. Most of TI's customers will make tradeoffs in taking advantage of those improvements. With the new C55 chip, for instance, a wireless-phone maker may decide to only double the battery life and use the chip's remaining performance capacity to add new features to the phone. TI says it designed the chips to run the same software that customers have designed for its previous DSPs. "This will let our customers move quickly," says Ray Simar, a TI employee. The company says software-development tools for the new chips will be available on its Web site Tuesday. It is already shipping samples of both chips to some customers. Volume production won't occur until later in the year. Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com