TI Home 
Search Feedback 
Semiconductor Home
The goal of the PC multimedia revolution is provide cost-effective, perceptually-valuable sensory interfaces between humans and computers, and loss-less, high-speed communications between computers. These interfaces have in part been technologically and economically enabled by high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) solutions, that provide the most cost-effective answer to multiple real-time audio, video, and communications needs.
Various price/performance points for PC multimedia functions fall on a continuum of diverse TI DSP Solutions, offering blend of signal processing and mixed-signal interface technologies; delivering the most cost- and performance-appropriate alternatives for high-performance PC multimedia.
Digital signal processors, for example, provide inexpensive, special-purpose distributed MIPS that can relieve a host CPU of the computing burden associated with math- and I/O-intensive applications that might severely degrade system-level performance. So-called "native signal processing" techniques, whereby signal processing code actually executes on a host microprocessor, can lead to performance compromises (such as reduced audio throughput), in the perceptual quality of the resulting multimedia interface. In a majority of cases, DSPs (whether as a general-purpose or custom co-processor or a dedicated solution), are more technologically and economically appropriate engines for solving signal processing problems. Likewise, the PC host processor's strengths lie in its ability to meet the insatiable demand for application software MIPS.
The advancement of the PC computing environment as a platform for a continuum of DSP solutions further establishes digital signal processing as a driving technology behind PC multimedia, and sets the stage for a massive proliferation of DSP-driven applications. And while TI DSP Solutions are driving the evolution of many principal mass-market product segments, no emerging DSP-driven application has received more recent attention than PC multimedia. Even though PC multimedia functionality is expected to account for less than 10% of the total available function-specific and programmable DSP market by 1999 (according to Forward Concepts' Will Strauss), it is this set of applications that is destined to overtly embed the importance of DSP solutions in the public awareness.
As the digital signal processing leader, TI's role, now as always, is to provide a range of targeted, cost- and performance-appropriate solutions to the signal processing side of the problem, working with the host processor and operating environment to handle the system functions which cooperatively facilitate the overall solution.
# # #