SGS-Thomson, NVidia show multimedia accelerator

Electronic News, May 22, 1995 by Anthony Cataldo

SUNNYVALE, CALIF. - Buoyed by a development, marketing and sourcing agreement with SGS-Thomson Microelectronics, two-year-old startup NVidia made a long-awaited entrance into the multimedia component market (EN, The Antenna, July 18, 1994) by introducing a two-chip solution to accelerate wavetable audio, video playback and 3-D graphics.

The companies hope the new NVidia-developed architecture, which takes up about as much board space as GUI accelerator, will draw add-in card vendors and software developers to commoditize multimedia in an exploding home PC market, said Michael Hara, NVidia's director of developer marketing. "What the consumer is used to is high quality for a low cost. But for the PC, the software developers don't know what the consumer is going to buy, so he assumes no video, GUI acceleration and an 8-bit SoundBlaster. We believe that this is the next level of integration for multimedia in the PC."

Compressing high performance multimedia functionality onto a single multimedia accelerator will ensure software developers a common performance baseline to work from, and in turn assures consumers will get the most from the multimedia experience. Mr. Hara said.

Unlike other fabless companies - which often hunt for leading-edge capacity and staff their own process development teams - NVidia has taken a different avenue by establishing an early relationship with SGS-Thomson Micro. But by gaining manufacturing stability, NVidia gave a high-volume consumer segment to SGS-Thomson, which is introducing a DRAM-based version called the STG2000 while NVidia will market the NV1 video RAM version for higher-end PC applications.

The two companies also co-developed a digital-to-analog (DAC) converter device to accompany the accelerator. SGS-Thomson Micro is already making the parts on a 0.5-micron, three-layer metal process in France. Although they cannot direct quote board prices on behalf of OEM customers, SGS-Thomson and NVidia expect boards with their parts could retail in the $350 and $200 ranges, respectively.

Mr. Hara said the two firms won't be competitive since they serve different price points. Both parts are expected to be used in PCs made and sold by Diamond Multimedia Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif. "NVidia can focus on performance and more enabling features and SGS can focus on serving the commodity market. Each partner is trying to do what it does best," said Mr. Hara.

The companies are already planning different architectural paths. SGS-Thomson, for example, said it will work to integrate the pallete DAC by year-end while NVidia said the high bandwidth requirements of the high-end market will likely keep the pallete DAC as a separate device capable of bus frequencies above 200MHz.

Stuart McLaren, SGS-Thomson's strategic marketing manager for the Graphics Business Unit, said SGS-Thomson brings to the table a record of serving consumer and computer IC markets, production expansions and process advancements. "We feel we're ideally positioned to take this product and drive it into the consumer marketplace." he said of the NV1/STG2000.

Tom Clarkson, VP of marketing for Brooktree's multimedia division, said the NVidia solution was anticipated and expects it to compete with Brooktree's BtV multimedia chipset. "I think its clearly aimed at the same space as we're looking at. We've been waiting for this to come out for a long time." Cirrus Logic reportedly also is planning a multimedia chip entry integrating DRAM, mixed signal and logic devices.

The NV1/STG2000 is the heart of a multimedia solution providing GUI acceleration, wave-table synthesis audio, real-time 3-D graphics, full-motion video acceleration and texturing, a digital game port, media synchronization and Windows support.

Current audio solutions are notorious for poor performance because they are tied to the the slower ISA bus, and such a configuration makes it difficult to synchronize speech with video playback while running concurrent background sounds, Mr. Hara said. The NV1 solves this with a 350 MIPS audio engine, which can play back digital audio plus wave-table sound effects without a stutter. Visually, the NV1 aims to give software title developers the tools to meld 3-D graphics with video playback.

The NV1 uses a 3-D acceleration technique known as quadratic texture mapping, which provides perspective correction and rendering of curved surfaces in real-time. The 3-D engine can render up to 75 million pixels per second at 800x600 resolutions, 64,000 colors and 30 frames per second.

The device also includes video texturing, a way of mapping video onto a surface that can be warped and lighted in the same way as a 3-D graphical image. All told, the solution provides 1,024x768, 16-bit color graphics displays and 30 frames-per -second video playback for add-in cards.

Audio, video and graphics control logic on-chip are hewed together using an internal 600MByte/sec packet bus. The device also interfaces to a 64-bit PCI or VL host bus for maximum data transfer rates. A memory interface allows 1-4 Mbytes of fast-page or EDO DRAM. A palette DAC interfaces to the RGB monitor and game port. The audio engine connects directly with an audio codec for sound I/0.