Texas Instruments Inc formally unveiled its new MVP Multimedia Video Processor 64-bit signal processor hours after we closed on Wednesday. The company claims that the part is 10 to 15 times faster than the most powerful personal computer microprocessor currently on the market and opens the door for new applications that only exist in our imaginations today. It is not cheap – it costs $400 in 10,000-up quantities, and although sampling has begun, it will not go into volume production until the first quarter of next year. Development of the part began long before people started talking about information superhighways, but the company believes that its launch now catches the tide at its flood. It sees applications for it in real-time video conferencing, global information libraries, telecommuting, virtual reality, distance learning and video-on-demand although at that price, applications are likely to be confined to the head-end and not the set-top – although set-top boxes is the application Sony Corp has in mind for it. The chip, a member of the TMS320 family, includes a RISC arithmetic-logic unit integrated with four separate signal processing units – and 4m transistors – on the single chip; the company claims performance of more than 2 G-operations per second. It is claimed to support all international compression standards as well as any proprietary algorithms. As well as Sony, Texas says that it has already won Xerox Corp, PictureTel Corp and fingerprint recognition systems specialist Printrak International Inc as customers for the signal processor.
