The Wheel of Reincarnation

Last week I chatted with a couple of friends about the x86 clones that appeared in the 1990s. Companies like Rise, Nexgen and Centaur.

When I got back to my desk I recalled that the mid-1990s also had a number of companies building media processors to offload MPEG-1/2/4 video, audio, 2D graphics and even modem codec processing.

Googling reveals a great example.

The Hot Chips 8 (1996!) presentation by Paul Kalapathy of Chromatic Research describes the Mpact multimedia processor.

A quick skim reveals an architecture that should be familiar to any GPU developer: a sea of general-purpose registers, huge on/off-chip bandwidth and SIMD vector opcodes driving integer ALUs and SFUs. The part reportedly achieved 1 BOPS at 120MHz.

Very impressive and another great spoke on the Wheel of Reincarnation!