It also provides NTSC image enhancement and MPEG-4 decoding, and anticipates advanced video services such as videoconferencing and interactive gaming. The reprogrammable device is meant to replace the hardwired MPEG and 3-D graphics engines currently used to format and display digital television. The device will do up to 20 billion pixel-formatting operations per second, according to the company. But the MAC1000, designed with financial backing from Hitachi Ltd., is entering the increasingly crowded and perilous market for media processors. Like the Equator Technologies part, the products of both Chromatic and Philips are based on VLIW architectures.
Equator believes it has a leg up on the competition.
Besides the financial backing from Hitachi, said marketing director Ted Niday, the Equator team invented VLIW processing at Multiflow Computer 15 years ago and learned some lessons about scalability in the process. Indeed, Multiflow's Tracing Scheduling Compiler, a parallelizing compiler that finds instructions that can be executed out of sequence, became the foundation of Equator's technology. This knocks system costs down significantly. All rights reserved.