|
|
|
 |
home | about | pictures | reference | trade | links |
MICROUNITY GIVES MORE DETAILS OF MEDIA PROCESSOR
(October 11th 1995) All the hottest properties at this year's
Microprocessor Forum are, not surprisingly, multimedia chips. After
six years of development, MicroUnity Systems Engineering Inc is ready
to talk about its "revolutionary" media processor.
Microsoft Corp has $15m in MicroUnity. Tele-Communications Inc,
Hewlett-Packard Co, US West Inc, Cray Research Inc and Motorola Inc
are also said to be backers of the secretive company.
In addition to making its own chips in a $50m fab, MicroUnity has
licensed its design to several other chip makers. Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is reported to be producing a
lower-power version of the chip already.
The MicroUnity chip, which was said at one time to be derived from
Digital Equipment Corp's Alpha RISC, integrates 10.5m transistors and
is clocked at a cookin' 1GHz. It can issue up to four 128-bit-wide
instructions simultaneously. MicroUnity has already developed
prototype versions of cable set-top boxes, cable network modems and
workstations based on the media processor.
The company was founded by John Moussouris, co-founder of MIPS
Computer Systems Inc. He claims that other microprocessors are
inefficient for use in digital communications because they are
designed for arithmetical computation and require assistance from
numerous other processors to handle specific tasks such as frequency
modulation, graphics processing and audio and video compression and
decompression. Prototypes are not expected until next year, with
volume in 1997.