Intel plots OEM tactic; AMD-Cyrix to team up

Electronic News, March 20, 1995 by Reinhardt Krause, Jim DeTar

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - Intel this week at the Window Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) will disclose the latest elements of its strategy for PC OEMs: a target reference platform supporting native signal processing (NSP) on Pentium and future MPUs and the Universal Serial Bus (USB) - a 12Mbps isochronous external device connection scheme for telephony and MPEG-2 compressed video that Intel will embed in its chipsets.

The one-two punch is the latest handiwork of the Intel Architecture Labs (IAL), which has previously pushed as industry standards the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus and other technologies. While Intel is attempting to take center stage at WinHEC, MPU rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Cyrix will together announce OpenPIC, a specification for programmable interrupt controller (PIC) technology for symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems.

Intel expects to make available a design guide for the NSP reference platform in 2Q this year. The NSP reference platform will meld a number of other Intel stragies for targeting emerging PC applications such as telephony, remote game playing and desktop video.

Intel's goal is to make "NSP-ready" a standard logo that will be supported by PC OEMs. To achieve that aim, the NSP reference platform describes a baseline capability for audio capture and playback, external communications and video capture and playback. Intel said the NSP platform will provide scalable performance; while systems might be labeled as "NSP ready" add-in cards would still boost performance or provide specialized functions.

While the pentium MPU would perform more functions than ever as the host processor, Intel's strategy also call for carefully off-loading certain tasks to audio coders and other devices such as graphics controllers. in addition to a shareable full-duplex audio codec for speech and conferencing applications, the NSP reference platform will describe CPU-based modem data pumps.

The reference platform requires 75MHz Pentium MPUs or better and third-generation PCI chipsets such as the recently-introduced Triton, which support EDO memory. Analog Devices recently disclosed new audio codec technology (EN, March 6) that complements Intel's NSP reference platform, and Intel is expected to reveal other affiances, with speculation centering on DSP Group's TrueSpeech technology (see this page).

The reference platform leverages the Intel/Microsoft display control interface (DCI) for graphics and video, Intel's 3DRender application programming interface, the PCI multimedia spec, the new Desktop Management Interface (DMI) and the Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data (DSVD) specification created last year with modem makers.

It also piggybacks Intel Architecture (IA) SPOX, a real-time kernal and development environment for Pentium MPUs developed with Spectron Microsystems; Intel claims IA-SPOX and NSP together make DSPs unnecessary for emerging multimedia applications. Microsoft in January dropped a bombshell on the DSP vendor community by distancing itself from the Resource Manager Interface (RMI) - a new specification tied to Windows 95 that would have paved the way for DSPs into the PC market (EN, Jan. 30).

Craig Kinnie, head of the IAL, is expected to describe the NSP reference platform this week during an address at WinHEC. While Intel has put many pieces in place to support NSP on the Pentium and upcoming P6, some additions are expected, such as extensions to DCI and 3DRender that support game interfaces and version 4.0 of Intel's Indeo video software codec. The P6 will eventually require a new cache/memory subsystem and a new I/O expansion bridge, but the I/O expansion bus is not expected to change significantly.

Another big part is USB, which will support connectivity for telephony applications and hardware - making it easier for users to install upgrades. in addition to Microsoft, the USB will be unveiled this week by Compaq, Digital Equipment, IBM, and two PBX suppliers: NEC and Northern Telecom.

The USB is not initially part of the NSP reference platform; however, the isochronous nature of the USB is a necessary component of Intel's strategy for providing NSP on Pentium MPUs. Jim Pappas, Intel's USB program manager, said the isochronous bandwidth supports real-time digital audio and telephony applications envisioned under the NSP reference platform.

The USB, which surfaced last year (EN Oct. 17), has been widely rumored to operate at 5Mbps. However. according to Mr. Pappas, PC OEMs such as Compaq that participated in the USB's development sought a higher data rate that would also support compressed video applications such as MPEG-2. In addition to supporting telephony, the USB will now support daisy-chained connections to consumer electronics peripherals, set-top boxes and other devices.

Intel said version ".9" of USB spec will be available later this month; version 1.0 should be completed in June. The earlier version will enable OEMs to take iL closer look at the spec, but products will need to be compliant with 1.0. Mr. Pappas said .9 includes a number of "place holders" for computer telephony integration (CTI), such as how to synchronize clocks.