Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : C-Cube -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BillyG who wrote (29285)	2/9/1998 6:45:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

Being able to say you have a MPEG4 encoder makes for such good press.

To: BillyG who wrote (29285)	2/9/1998 7:37:00 PM
From: John Rieman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

TI and Chromatic look like a match. Think they're courting????????? techweb.cmp.com Posted: 6:00 p.m. EST, 2/09/98 Texas Instruments hints at tomorrow's media processor By Anthony Cataldo SAN FRANCISCO -- A senior executive from Texas Instruments Inc. strongly hinted to an audience at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference that his company is interested in pursuing a fully programmable, VLIW media signal processor that would serve as a gateway for media streams through a television. Separately, Chromatic Research Inc., a developer of media processors, said it is now providing software-development kits for its Mpact-2 device. Karl Guttag, a fellow with TI's digital signal processing semiconductor group in Dallas, said he is "very optimistic about media processors." In the next three years, he said, these processors will make TVs the chief source of information and entertainment for consumers. He would not say whether TI is working on such a media processor. "This media platform will need Mips, because it will suck in a lot of algorithms," Guttag said. Aside from a media processor, such a TV-based platform will likely include plug-in modules, a hard drive, DVD-RAM, a large chunk of memory and a fast processor. But Guttag said TI is not interested in pursuing the conventional set-top box, which will eventually have "all the profit of calculator chips." The new platform won't look anything like the PC-based entertainment systems Intel Corp. is espousing, he said. "It's a very PC-centric view of television to think that consumers want a PC in their living room," said Guttag. "Intel is going to own all the worthwhile silicon in the PC, but the bad news is that it may not be the main platform in the future. The PC is still too buggy, slow and isn't in real-time." Throwing another barb, he derided Intel's MMX instruction set as "the emperor's new clothes for the industry," a sentiment shared by many of the panelists discussing media signal processors, who pointed out the dearth of software support for MMX. Guttag emphasized that the ideal media processor would be fully programmable and would contain no hardwired dedicated functions. He said this will accomplish two things. First, it will give semiconductor suppliers an opportunity to make more money because hardwired chips, such as MPEG-2 decoders, will always suffer drastic price erosion. "Just about the time the industry gets it down right, we saturate the market. This is the fundamental problem that we face," Guttag said. "If that's the future, I will not go into that business. All you do is build up inventory." Second, a programmable media processor will ensure maximum flexibility of the platform as algorithms and standards change. "We grossly underestimate the degree of change that can occur in a platform like that," he said. "Once you go down the slippery slope of putting dedicated functions on-chip, you lose flexibility." Guttag said the ideal media-processor architecture will be a mix of very long instruction word (VLIW), single instruction multiple data (SIMD) for video processing and homogenous multiprocessing. "I like VLIW because it works well, but it's code inefficient," he said. "It's a trade-off of performance for code size, but it's more appealing from a compiler perspective than superscalar." He added that one of the biggest challenges for semiconductor vendors is putting together a solid group of software-tool developers, and bemoaned the fact that only one-third to one-quarter of TI's DSP development team is working on software tools. "That's been one of our chief failings," he said. Providing good software tools for media processors was one of the main themes of the panel discussion. And to the surprise of some, Chromatic Research (Sunnyvale, Calif.) revealed it too was providing tools-including compilers, debuggers and documentation-for its Mpact 2 processor. Until recently, all graphics, video and communications software development was done exclusively in house. "Initially our ability to support the outside was next to nil. As the tools mature, we can support more projects at greater length," said Steve Purcell, chief technical officer for Chromatic. "We're looking to open new territory or create new business opportunities."