Silicon valley start-up Chromatic Research Inc claims has beaten rivals such as Samsung, Phillips and IBM by becoming the first company to ship a full-blown media processor along with its associated software. The Mpact/3000 chip itself, a vector part with 1.5 million transistors – about the same as Intel Corp’s 486 – is now shipping in sample quantities from Chromatic’s two silicon manufacturing partners, Toshiba America Electronic Components and LG Semicon America. It’s a high-bandwidth, highly parallel chip implemented in 0.35 micron CMOS running at 62.5MHz, and uses VLIW very long instruction word and SIMD single instruction multiple data parallel techniques. The software, which Chromatic calls Mpact mediaware release 1.0, has modules to support 2D and 3D graphics, MPEG video, audio, fax/modem and telephony, as well as a real-time kernel and resource manager for real-time scheduling and dynamic resource management. The whole package is designed to act as a co-processor solution for Intel-based PCs with a PCI bus, with the aim of dramatically cutting the cost of PC multimedia systems. These currently require separate high-end digital audio cards, fax/modems and 64-bit graphics acceleration cards to do the same job as an Mpact add-in card. The first actual products from OEMs, likely to cost substantially under $500, could be on sale before the end of the year. Sunnyvale, California-based Chromatic was founded in September 1993 with $40m venture capital funding which it hasn’t finished spending yet, and says it could move into profit by mid-next year without having to raise more money. There are 170 employees. Chromatic claims that Microsoft’s recent talk about Talisman, a similar sounding hardware and software bundle for multimedia (CI No 2,975), endorses the whole media processor approach, though Talisman won’t be fully out until 1998. It counts Samsung’s MSP-1, Philips’ Trimedia and IBM’s Mfast – all using similar very long instruction word technology – amongst its rivals, though it says they all have a long way to catch up. It’s currently looking for a third silicon manufacturer. Research firm MicroDesign Resources thinks the whole media processor market will be worth $1.6bn by the year 2000, representing 55.5 million unit shipments.
