This week’s Microprocessor Forum event in San Francisco promises the usual advanced previews of forthcoming chips, including the first crop of multimedia processors from Chromatic Research Inc, Samsung Electronics Co and MicroUnity Systems Engineering Inc. Relative newcomer Chromatic’s Mpact chip has already been detailed (CI No 3,011). But at the Forum, Samsung’s competing Multimedia Signal Processing chip will be introduced by its project manager, superscalar RISC guru L T Nguyen, along with the MediaProcessor from struggling MicroUnity (CI No 2,968), which needs to make a big impact and preferably sign a few licensing deals if it is to survive. Aiming at the same problem from a slightly different angle will be three iAPX-86-compatible chips that implement the Intel Corp MMX multimedia extensions instruction set, most notably the P55C Pentium from Intel itself, though Cyrix Corp’s M2 6×86 and Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s K6 will also be trying to grab some of the attention. Also promised are detailed descriptions of Digital Equipment Corp’s fastest Alpha to date, the 21264, Sun Microsystems Inc’s picoJava chip, LSI Logic Corp’s TinyRISC implementation of a new 16-bit MIPS-compatible instruction subset from Silicon Graphics Inc, adding to its MiniRISC set of microprocessor cores, and a mystery Very Long Instruction Word processor for multimedia acceleration from Fujitsu Ltd. Finally Hitachi Ltd is set to introduce a new member of its SH family of processors, presumably the SH4, with special extensions for three-dimensional graphics. The Sega Enterprises Ltd Saturn games machine uses two of the current SH3 iteration of the RISC.
