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To: Don Dorsey who wrote (33184)	5/13/1998 3:51:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Mitsubishi chip will lower the price of settops and cable modems....... Mitsubishi Announces Sample Availability of QAM Channel Decoder for Cable Modem, Digital CATV Set-top Box and MMDS System Applications SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 1998-- MCNS-compliant channel decoder integrates QAM demodulator, forward error correction decoder and A-D converter functions on a single chip The Electronic Device Group of Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc. today announced sample availability of the M65690FP QAM Channel Decoder chip, which complies with the Multimedia Cable Network System (MCNS) standard and reduces the overall system development costs of cable modem, digital CATV set-top box and multichannel multipoint distribution system (MMDS) applications. The high-performance features of the M65690FP chip's carrier-recovery loop and equalizer reduces tuner performance requirements, allowing designers to use a more cost-effective tuner for the system's front end. The M65690FP reduces back-end system development costs by integrating quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) demodulator, forward error correction (FEC) decoder, 10-bit A-D converter and voltage-controlled crystal oscillator (VCXO) functions into a single chip. The reduced system chip count simplifies design and conserves printed circuit board space. The M65690FP has a typical power consumption of 900 mW at 22 MHz. The M65690FP conforms to the MCNS specification by using a 64-QAM and 256-QAM modulation scheme and a concatenated FEC scheme consisting of Reed-Solomon and Trellis decoders, a deinterleaver that supports fixed and variable interleaving, a derandomizer and MPEG-2 framing. The decoder's I2C(TM) bus control allows designers to monitor bit error counts, symbol constellation, acquisition time and internal signals of the device. More........ newsalert.com

To: Don Dorsey who wrote (33184)	5/13/1998 4:18:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 50808

AltiVec MACS execute multimedia instructions........ Apple's ties Mac's future to AltiVec instructions By Craig Matsumoto SAN JOSE, Calif. - Apple Computer Inc. will use the AltiVec instruction set in Macintosh computers and expects to have AltiVec-enabled Macs for sale in the first half of next year, the company said at its Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday. It it still unclear what effect these plans will have on Apple's relationship with IBM Corp., which will continue to develop PowerPC processors without AltiVec. Apple officials made it clear that AltiVec is a big part of the Macintosh's future - the Mac OS is even being altered to exploit the instructions. Speaking at the conference's hardware keynote yesterday, senior vice president of hardware engineering Jon Rubinstein said Apple had spent two years assisting Motorola Inc. in developing AltiVec, which consists of 162 new PowerPC instructions that target multimedia applications and are optimized for MacOS native code. "This is not some tacky little add-on to the chip," said Keith Diefendorff, director of processing architecture for Apple and the company's chief AltiVec architect. "This is a significant investment in transistors." Company officials spoke to a largely supportive crowd at the conference. Many of the developers attending Diefendorff's session on the PowerPC's future developments were anxious to get their hands on development tools for AltiVec, and Diefendorff drew strong murmurs of approval when he hinted at some of the functionality that AltiVec could make possible, such as a software-based cellular phone inside a laptop computer. Initially dubbed "VMX," for "vector multimedia extension," AltiVec adds an independent vector unit aside from the integer and floating-point units within a chip to provide a faster and wider path for multimedia-driven calculations. The vector unit has 32 registers of 128 bits each, and a dedicated 128-bit pipeline to memory, which is wider than the 64 bits that are available to the floating-point unit. Apple hopes AltiVec goes beyond its multimedia roots and provides a speed boost to any algorithm that can take advantage of parallel processing. Apple has already tried this with several algorithms, and Diefendorff encouraged developers to do the same. More.......... pubs.cmpnet.com