| Developers and analysts are raving over a new DSP
(digital signal processor) that shatters speed records and
brings an unprecedented level of performance to the
desktop. The highly integrated chip from Texas Instruments
(Dallas, TX) will begin appearing early next year in
products ranging from high-end video-capture boards and
image processors to videoconferencing systems. It's so
fast that it leaves powerful RISC chips in the dust and
opens the door to applications that weren't practical
before, such as portable fingerprint recognizers and
on-the-fly digital filtering of video frames. TI says the TMS 320C80, which is better known as the MVP (multimedia video processor), executes 2 billion operations per second, about 10 times the performance of previous single-chip DSPs. "It's probably an order of magnitude faster than any other DSP," says Gerry Kaufhold, principal analyst for ThorKa Research — TRIMM ((602) 820-9112), a research and consulting firm focused on multimedia. Another ThorKa analyst, Rick Sizemore, refers to the chip as "the god of DSPs." The MVP achieves its breakthrough performance with a combination of high integration and a unique microarchitecture. On a single chip, it integrates four 64-bit DSPs, a 32-bit RISC CPU with an FPU, dual video controllers, a DMA controller with a 64-bit DRAM interface, and 50 KB of SRAM (static RAM). Using a 0.5-micron CMOS process, it incorporates 4 million transistors — about 30 percent more than a Pentium microprocessor. The MVP is sampling now, and TI says full production will begin early next year. At an expected cost of $300 to $400 in 10,000-unit quantities, this powerful chip won't likely begin showing up on commodity PCs anytime soon, however. Because the MVP is fully programmable and supports MIMD (multiple-instruction/multiple-data) throughput, it can be applied to industry-standard compression algorithms such as JPEG (for still images), MPEG (for motion video), and H.261 (for videoconferencing), as well as to proprietary schemes. An integrated transfer controller supports off-chip DRAM, VRAM (video RAM), and SRAM with 400 MBps of I/O bandwidth. Developers say the MVP can do things that now require expensive workstations or multiple boards with numerous DSPs. For example, Printrak (Anaheim, CA), which makes fingerprint-recognition systems, is working on an MVP-based recognizer that replaces 28 DSP boards with a single board that's portable enough to be installed in a police cruiser. Dr. Yongmin Kim, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington (Seattle), has been working with prototypes of the chip since 1990. He is developing an MVP-based high-end multimedia board that plugs into a VL-Bus slot. Future versions will support PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect). The board, to be sold under a nonexclusive license by Precision Digital Images (Redmond, WA), performs audio/video processing, JPEG/MPEG encoding, and P*64 compression for videoconferencing. Kim says his single MVP board replaces the equivalent of eight DSP boards costing $30,000; PDI expects to sell it for about $10,000. Kim says a convolution filter performed on a 512- by 512-pixel video frame that took four seconds to execute on a 486-based PC requires only 19 milliseconds on the MVP. "Researchers all over the country are going to feel like they died and went to heaven when they get hold of this thing," says DSP analyst Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts (Tempe, AZ). "Every laboratory in the country is going to want one of these for voice recognition, high-end audio/video processing, and what have you. Of course, the military is going to love it, because there's nothing else better for radar and sonar processing." Copyright 1994-1998 BYTE |