Start-ups star at MPU forum; Chromatic Research to unveil engine

Electronic News, Oct 9, 1995 by Jim DeTar

mountain view, calif.--After nearly two years of planning amid intense scrutiny by the media and industry research firms, start-up Chromatic Research will this week launch its first product, the Mpact media engine, with manufacturing partners Toshiba America and LG Semicon.

As reported earlier, Chromatic Research, which is headed by 25-year semiconductor industry veteran Wes Patterson--the company's president and CEO--has forged partnerships with both companies (EN, Antenna, Sept. 18), including an equity investment by Toshiba that guarantees manufacturing capacity.

"We have chips and will be sampling in November, with the first product shipments next May. You will see PCs with the chip next spring," Mr. Patterson said in a broad-ranging interview with Electronic News. Steven Purcell, Chromatic Research's chief technology officer, will offer a presentation Tuesday on the new chip at the Microprocessor Forum conference in San Jose, Calif.

Chromatic Research's Mpact chip consists of two components: 1) a single high-bandwidth, parallel media processor, and 2) "mediaware" software modules that enable seven multimedia functions and various levels of capabilities within each function, enabling the chip to potentially replace several chipsets and/or add-in cards and preserve real estate on the motherboard.

The seven multimedia functions integrated into the Mpact media engine include: video, 2-D graphics acceleration, 3-D graphics acceleration, audio, fax/modem, telephony and videophone.

A complete Mpact hardware/software configuration is expected to sell for about $150 when it ships in quantity next spring. The 1.4 million-transistor Mpact media engine is a vector processor optimized for multimedia functions. It uses very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture--the same architecture that the Intel/Hewlett-Packard alliance reportedly will use in the combined x86/PA-RISC processor they are co-developing for release by the end of the decade.

Mpact is Microsoft Windows 95-compatible and features a 792-bit wide internal datapath which is linked via high-speed connections to different levels of on- and off-chip memory. The media engine makes use of Rambus DRAM memory technology, which offers 500 megabytes/sec. bandwidth. A single 2MB Rambus DRAM could serve as the media buffer memory for the Mpact media engine, thereby reducing board space and cost to PC OEMs, according to Chromatic Research, which was originally known as Xenon Microsystems.

In terms of performance, the multimedia chip can perform 2 billion integer operations per second (IOPs). By way of contrast, for typical tasks, a 120MHz Intel Pentium performs about 200 million IOPs. The Pentium Pro (formerly the P6) is expected to perform about 300 million IOPs.

Despite the Mpact chip's faster integer performance, it is not suitable as a general-purpose processor. "This is not a general-purpose processor in any sense of the word," Mr. Patterson said.

Rather, it was designed to act as a co-processor to x86 chips in PC systems, as well as consumer devices. The Mpact chip does not include functions that can more effectively be performed by the x86, such as operations involving floating point calculations, used in 3-D graphics.

While it would take at least 10 of the fastest Pentiums to do the job of one Mpact media processor, it would also take about 10 or more Mpact media processors to perform the general-purpose functions of a Pentium, Chromatic Research said.

Despite the fact that it is designed to work in conjunction with x86 processors, the Mpact chip will also compete with Intel's native signal processing (NSP) strategy--which is to bring digital signal processing (DSP)-type functions onto the x86 MPU itself.

Mr. Patterson contends that because his company's processor is designed specifically to function as a hardware/software multimedia solution it can do the job better than NSP. "In talking with PC OEMs, we have found they are not interested in NSP. It is below the bar in terms of quality," he asserted.

The business partnerships Chromatic Research has forged with Toshiba and LG Semicon (formerly Goldstar Electron) are not typical in the industry, although they are similar to the arrangements fabless semiconductor suppliers such as Altera, Xilinx and Lattice have with foundries.

"This business model is the first of its kind. There is no way to do what we are doing without Toshiba's help," Mr. Patterson said. "These are their (Toshiba and LG Semicon) chips. We are getting capacity commitments; it's not an us-vs.-them relationship."

Under terms of the agreements, Toshiba and LG Semicon have licensed Chromatic Research's design and will manufacture and sell the Mpact media processor under the Mpact brand name. Both Toshiba and LG Semicon are gearing up for production of the processors in 1996 using 0.5-micron and 0.35-micron manufacturing processes.

Amir Naghavi, director of ASSP marketing for Toshiba America Electronic Components (TAEC), said: "Toshiba was a significant investor in Chromatic Research from early on." Mr. Naghavi said that Toshiba in Japan strongly backs the alliance. "The Mpact chip will simultaneously be introduced in the U.S. and Japan," he noted.