1997-07-13 , E/IC-801/650

Every year the software industry creates ever more sophisticated software that places more and more demands on the computer's processor. Philips Semiconductors has created a solution in the form of a new multimedia accelerator chip called the TriMedia™ TM-1000, which is now shipping. It has been designed to work as a coprocessor with the main processor chip of a personal computer and takes the load of intensive multimedia applications. Being optimised for this task, it can deliver stunning multimedia that the main, generalised processor cannot manage on its own, for example high performance graphics, high quality MPEG2 playback, high fidelity sound, or high frame rate video conferencing, leaving the main processor free for other tasks such as spreadsheets, word processing, etc.

Despite its complexity with over 5.5 million transistors, Philips Semiconductors is aggressively pricing the TriMedia TM-1000 at only $50 in high volume quantities. "Multimedia is the hot topic for 1997," explained Dion Lisle, PC Segment Marketing Manager for the TriMedia Product Group, "and so our timing for the availability of the TriMedia TM-1000 could not be better - especially since the TriMedia architecture has been chosen by Microsoft for its Talisman 3D real-time graphics initiative. It scored here as its instruction set has been designed with multimedia in mind and it matches Microsoft's vision for the PC."

The TriMedia TM-1000 can be used as a coprocessor in conjunction with Pentiums and Pentium Pros as well as their MMX variants, the PowerPC and other processor architectures. TriMedia ICs can be used singly or in groups for added processing power on motherboards or on add-in cards, offering a simple and direct route for personal computer manufacturers to develop leading-edge multimedia computers that would otherwise be virtually impossible.

Philips Semiconductors has drawn on many years of experience in Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) to create this media processor, which is already being designed in or evaluated by many leading computer companies. Its versatility and FLEXibility come from PhilipsÌ novel design that is essentially a general purpose DSP that can be easily programmed to do a variety of different tasks, such as video conferencing using the new H.324 standard, MPEG-1 encoding and decoding, MPEG multichannel audio or AC3 Dolby Digital Audio, just by loading the appropriate programme. This also enables it to be used as a stand alone processor in consumer electronic products such as set top boxes, high end TVs or Web TVs.

The TriMedia architecture has been designed from the ground up as a concurrent media processor and, as it is not tied to any existing architectures, Philips has been able to optimise the chipÌs multimedia processing performance. "Essentially, we are offering the best of all worlds," explained Lisle. "As a proprietary architecture, we have been able to optimise performance in a way which would not have been possible if we had issues of backwards compatibility to address. Yet we have been able to create a completely open, CPU-style programming environment where developers can work in a familiar language (C or C++) to quickly and easily develop their own applications."

One of the reasons why the TriMedia design offers such high multimedia processing performance of 4 billion operations per second is its highly parallel architecture, which allows simultaneous processing of different media types. Based on a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) technology and an innovative scheduling and optimising compiler, the instruction pipeline allows up to five simultaneous operations to be issued per cycle. Each operation can be targeted at any of the 27 functional units in the CPU, including integer and floating-point arithmetic units and data-parallel DSP-like units. Moreover, each operation can consist of multiple instructions and a number of the instructions themselves are dedicated to multimedia processing tasks.

The main functional blocks of the TriMedia IC are the VLIW DSP processor core itself, a memory interface for SDRAM (Synchronous DRAM) and dedicated peripheral I/O blocks for interfacing with multimedia data streams. It has a PCI interface allowing video display and audio play back via a host PCÌs video card and sound hardware. On-board accelerators are dedicated to image coprocessing to provide display support for scaled live video in a number of arbitrarily overlapped windows, and to variable length decoding that is used for MPEG-2 decoding. A V.34 interface requires only an external modem front-end chip and phone line interface to provide remote communication support. The modem can be used to connect TriMedia-based systems for video phone or video conferencing applications, or it can be used for general purpose data communication in PC systems.

Philips Semiconductors' TriMedia Software Development Environment (SDE) provides a complete C/C⁺⁺ programming environment for easy application development and performance tuning. At the core of the SDE is a powerful compiler, which shifts the complexity of instruction scheduling from the hardware to the compiler. It helps reduce time-to-market and development costs, and is complemented by a growing list of software modules (including MPEG-2, V.34, H.324 and Wavetable Synthesis) in the TriMedia application library, which developers can easily integrate with their applications.

The TriMedia concept is already roadmapped to a third generation and Philips plans a number of application-specific derivatives and faster devices through process shrinks. The first 100 MHz TriMedia TM-1000, which is shipping now, will be followed by faster derivatives (133 MHz and 166 MHz), and there will also be a TM-PC specifically for Microsoft's Talisman. The TM-2 will have additional features and offer four times the performance of the TM-1000.

As part of Philips' strategy of providing an open platform which will drive the development of new, innovative multimedia applications, the TriMedia group has also been developing partnerships with leading companies. This has led to alliances with Metrowerks and InVision Interactive Inc. The agreement with Metrowerks will mean the integration of Philips TriMedia development tools into Metrowerks Codewarrior IDE software development environment, effectively providing new software programming tools for improving real-time graphic, audio and video quality for MAC OS systems. InVision InteractiveÌs sophisticated music synthesis technology, Cybersound, will be integrated into the TriMedia family and CybersoundÌs software code libraries will also be made available to TriMedia customers under this agreement, allowing the development of state-of-the-art audio capabilities for their multimedia applications.