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

To: DiViT who wrote (34051)	6/28/1998 8:58:00 AM
From: John Rieman	Respond to of 50808

C-Cube's adding Firewire.................................. techweb.com 1394 pickup As Fibre Channel picks up momentum in the high end, 1394, the serial interface aimed at desktops, is still more tortoise than hare. It's been more than a decade since Apple first started talking about an interface that would make it easy to add high-speed peripherals-including consumer electronic devices such as cameras-to a computer. But the industry is finally reaching a point where these consumer products now need a digital interface, since they are shifting to digital circuitry and are starting to be attached to PCs. The market for 1394 products is still a ways off, but it's starting to seem closer than in previous years. "Most consumer electronics manufacturers have TVs, set-top boxes, DVD recorders and other products with 1394 that will be out in the year 2000," said Christie Tadwell, senior product marketing manager at C-Cube Microsystems Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.). "We will be adding a 1394 core into our next-generation MPEG codec, putting in the digital portion." C-Cube is just one of a growing number of vendors adding 1394 products to their repertoire. The interface is being upgraded to give it capabilities beyond its ability to interconnect several peripherals with identical cables that aren't bulky, like those of ATA. "One of the big things coming is data encryption across Fire-wire," said Chris Mills, who manages the technical aspects of 1394 for C-Cube. "That needs to be in place before it's widely used in consumer electronics. Those guys don't want copyrighted digital data moving around without protection." The push to add data encryption points up the importance that consumer electronic providers place on 1394. They aren't putting any effort into copyright protection for ATA. "If you look at content protection using encryption, basically the developers are working with one external interface, 1394," said Patrick Yu, system application engineering manager for serial interfaces at NEC Corp.'s Application Group (Santa Clara, Calif.). "If you're going to put a DVD-ROM drive on your computer and you want to ship data out for HDTV, 1394 is the only interface that is now being defined to do it."

To: DiViT who wrote (34051)	6/29/1998 9:51:00 AM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

100,000 gates must be a typo... or hype. I-frame only would be a quick way to go, but they imply that they do IBP on their website: icompression.com "The chip also contains a MPEG-2 encoding engine that supports IBBP GOP structures for optimal compression." Two questions: (1) Does IBBP mean "IBP"? (2) Does "supports IBBP" mean that it actually does IBP compression or that the compressed data stream is only "compatible" with IBP streams, such as might be achieved with I-frame only compression?