Single-Chip Processor For Media Applications: The Map1000 (Tm)

The growing demand for multimedia applications such as digital television, video teleconferencing, machine vision, office automation products, digital cameras and camcorders, and medical imaging has created a need for a processor capable of meeting the challenging computing requirements these applications demand. To meet the requirements for a new processor technology that avoids the inflexibility of ASICs and the expense and complexity of multiprocessor solutions, Equator Technologies has developed a very long instruction word (VLIW) processor named the MAP1000(TM). This media processing chip delivers high-level language programmability with increased processor performance through on-chip parallelism for a variety of uses, ranging from a digital TV with a standalone embedded MAP1000(TM) to a personal computer-based media processor accelerator. We present an analysis of the MAP1000(TM) processor architecture and provide several performance benchmarks using popular media-processing applications. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.