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Technology Stocks : Texas Instruments - Good buy now or should we wait? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill Harmond who wrote (2113)	11/17/1997 12:47:00 AM
From: Michael Harney	Respond to of 6180

William, Yes, for an application that is very cost sensitive and meets the speed requirements (cell phones are doing more these days, though - digital PCS,etc), DSP processors kick butt on FPGA's! However, processors can take several instruction cycles and memory fetches to do what a dedicated piece of hardware w/o memory does in one cycle. The thing that keeps coming back with the cheap processors is this: Cell phone company wants to add more functions, and changing the processor's code in your existing phone will slow down the existing functions. This means a new, faster processor and therefore a new phone. The same thing happens with FPGA's, but not as often - changing the FPGA's code is harder to do from a design standpoint, but you if you have left even a little room in the part you can do another function without slowing anything down! A DSP processor only has one pipeline, but a gate array can have a bunch - each pipeline is really simple but when working together in parallel, they really rock! I am long on TI , though - I believe their DLM Projectavision stuff is going to take off.