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Try searching for travel information for your winter ski trip. How fun is it to click on a hot link and wait? Wait while a bit-mapped still photograph slowly downloads.
Wouldn't it be more fun to click and suddenly be skiing down a crisp, clear ski trail in the Rockies? You can see the trail markers and hear your skis swish over the snow.
That's true PC multimedia. And it's a lot closer to reality with two new disclosures from TI:
These disclosures will enable designers to move their PC onto the multimedia fast track. For example, 200 mbps of I/O bandwidth allows PC display of a 640 x 480 pixel VGA image at 30 frames per second. Even with this movie-quality video, there still is enough bandwidth for peripheral devices.
"Rather than processor speed, I/O bandwidth has become the factor that is limiting new killer applications on PCs," said James Snider, TI's 1394 marketing manager. "1394 not only gives PC developers the high speeds they need for movie-quality video, for example, but as a serial I/O bus, 1394 has higher resolution and less noise than parallel I/O buses like SCSI and IDE. The opportunies for PC-based desktop video conferencing on one wire, multimedia authoring and other applications are endless. And our new chipset solution for PCI bus-based PCs makes it much easier for developers to implement 1394 than ever before."
The PCI link layer device is the industry's first platform-specific 1394 interface device. Previously, 1394 could only be interfaced to the PCI bus with a minimum of four discrete devices. The "PCI Lynx" features a 1K FIFO for smooth isochronous and asynchronous data transfers and to shorten lengthy latencies on the PCI bus. The device features four DMA channels and supports scatter-gather data storage and retrieval from memory. A Zoomed Video port (ZV port) allows transfers of data directly to auxiliary devices, such as a graphics card, without involving the CPU. With this capability, an image can be displayed on a PC's monitor while the CPU is performing more critical tasks. The device also supports VESA and PCMCIA specifications for the ZV port.
The new physical layer device provides twice the I/O throughput over the 1394 bus of previous-generation devices and two-and-a-half times the throughput of parallel buses such as SCSI and IDE. But a serial bus offers greater reduced noise because crosstalk, which occurs on parallel buses, is eliminated.
The three-port, 3-V device has been integrated with the logic required to perform bus arbitration and initialization functions.
Skipstone, Inc., of Austin, Texas, has released the SerialSoft Developer Toolkit for 1394. The kit is a complete hardware and software environment for developing 1394 applications and services for a variety of software and hardware configurations. Providing both asynchronous and isochronous data transfers, the SerialSoft API allows developers to write their applications to a high-level interface and avoid the complexity and variability of IEEE 1394 implementations. Software developed with Skipstone's tools can be directly ported to TI's 1394 devices.
Samples of the PCI link layer chip will be available during 1Q96 with volume production scheduled for the second quarter. Suggested resale pricing in quantities of 100,000 is expected in the sub-$20 range.
The 200-Mbps physical layer device will sample during the 4Q95 and is scheduled to go into volume production in 1Q96. Suggested resale pricing in quantities of 100,000 is expected to be $12.
For high-volume applications, integrated 1394 solutions are available directly from TI for below $10 in quantities of 1 million.
The SerialSoft Developer Toolkit is available from Skipstone at (512) 305-0200.
November 1995, vol. 12, no. 8