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To: John Rieman who wrote (35409)	8/23/1998 10:45:00 PM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Motorola working on a VLIW processor............ Motorola recharges the VLIW DSP debate By Stephan Ohr with additional reporting by Ron Wilson AUSTIN, Texas - Add Motorola Inc. to the list of companies that plan to leverage a very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) architecture in a digital signal processor. News that Motorola is betting on VLIW for at least one future DSP may trigger a new round of debate within a growing circle of companies that have tapped, or tripped over, this contentious approach for using software to extend processor performance. Fred Shlapak, senior vice president and general manager of mixed-signal technology, tipped Motorola's plans to use VLIW during a conversation about StarCore, a joint-development project with Lucent Technologies Inc. (Murray Hill, N.J.). VLIW is a central component of one of three or four separate DSP projects currently in the works as Motorola looks at ways to implement third-generation cellular, said Shlapak. PowerPC cores, low-voltage RF and flash memory are among the other technologies being considered. But any conjecture about another VLIW entry is bound to cause a stir. DSP leader Texas Instruments Inc. (Houston) has taken hits for the VLIW architecture embodied in its groundbreaking C6X, which critics call power hungry and difficult to use. Others using VLIW, like Philips Semiconductors' TriMedia Group (Sunnyvale, Calif.), have scaled down the number of applications they are prepared to support. Media-chip maker Chromatic Research (Mountain View, Calif.) has abandoned the technique, while startup Equator Technologies Inc. (Seattle) vows to use it. Motorola was quick to assert that VLIW would not be part of the joint-development deal with Lucent. "There is VLIW effort, but it's only in a laboratory stage," said wireless product marketing director Rhonda Dirvin. "VLIW has its down sides, and there's other ways to get DSP performance." Neither Dirvin nor Shlapak would offer more details. But Moto and Lucent are jointly slated to present a paper at the Microprocessor Forum in October on "a highly parallel fixed-point DSP that promises to expand the envelope of DSP performance." Motorola DSP architect Kevin Kloker, soon to be named a co-leader of the StarCore development team, was unavailable for comment. But James Boddie, who heads Lucent's side of the StarCore effort, gave this assessment: "VLSI technology allows us to put many resources on one chip. The question is, how do we control those resources? VLIW? Superscalar? Multiprocessor? For StarCore, we will look at all of these." VLIW depends on compiler technology, Boddie said. The architecture alleviates the need to program in assembly, but it is not code-efficient without what Boddie calls "instruction-level parallelism. Without [it], you'll have sparse use of [program] memory with many 'no ops.' " Lacking high code density, you need more memory and that increases system costs, said Boddie. In cellular handsets, very high code density reduces the amount of memory required. It also cuts the number of cycles needed to access memory - and that conserves power. Indications that VLIW is slipping from its pedestal even among adherents came in Philips Semiconductors' unveiling of the next TriMedia at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif. While the next-generation design inherits a pure VLIW base from its predecessor, the TriMedia 1000, the new chip overlays that base with a very un-VLIW construct: purpose-built, fixed-function execution units. "We found that there were certain operations that were quite difficult to code in the existing VLIW instruction set," said Joss van Eijndhoven of Philips Research Labs. Consequently, the architects outfitted the next-gen architecture with "SuperOps" - operations that can have up to four arguments and two results, and that are better suited to some media-processing needs. Examples offered by van Eijndhoven are vector-mixing, half-pixel averaging and vector-rotate operations. Such operations break up the conventional flow of VLIW instructions and force those writing compilers and assembly code to break a sweat. But they can have a remarkable impact on throughput, van Eijndhoven said. For example, he said the presence of only two SuperOps - an application-specific shift and a 2-D average - could reduce an MPEG block motion-compensation task from 82 machine cycles to 31. More............. eet.com

To: John Rieman who wrote (35409)	8/24/1998 10:37:00 AM
From: BillyG	Respond to of 50808

Pioneer [CUBE/DIVI partner] aims for No. 1 in DVDs By Reuters Special to CNET NEWS.COM August 24, 1998, 6:50 a.m. PT TOKYO--Japan's Pioneer Electronic said today that it aims for group sales of $8.4 billion in fiscal 2005-06 and aims to become the No. 1 company in the global market for digital video discs. It also aims for group net profit of $386 million and a group-based return-on-equity ratio of 10 percent in 2005-06, the company said in a statement. Pioneer will also increase its sales and manufacturing of plasma display panels for both domestic and overseas markets by the year 2005, president Chikao Ito said at a news conference. The company expects to expand its business from one centered on stand-alone technology to one concentrating more on products such as cable and digital satellite television and car navigation systems, he said. By the year 2005, Pioneer expects its new products, centered around DVDs, plasma displays, DVD-car navigation systems, and digital set-top boxes, to make up around 40 percent of its total group sales, he said. "We expect sales of DVD-related products to be about $1.9 billion, while plasma displays should sell around $842 million," Ito said. The company also has a target of $491 million in sales of products related to DVD-car navigation systems, and $350 million for digital set-top boxes in the domestic and overseas markets, he said. news.com