4 ms·
Fascinating, I never thought of them as general purpose processors (though they obviously could do it). Any idea why they were chosen?
by flopsamjetsam 4y ago
Fascinating, I never thought of them as general purpose processors (though they obviously could do it). Any idea why they were chosen?
- dboreham 4y agoThere are a few reasons. I'll talk about two. One is technical in that Inmos had a signal processing business and was strongly staffed in that area. This offered the potential to eventually make a SoC solution that had CPU and MPEG in hardware. The other is that there were some smart people in marketing at Inmos who at some point decided that they would pick a small set of target applications that they expected to be growth areas, and where we had some existing experience, then devote serious dedicated resources to each of those areas. Two of the areas were STB and GPS. The serious resources devoted included engineers who would be pretty much full time available to the OEMs, and were dedicated to their target application. I think it was Richard Onyett who had the STB brief. He spent years working on those design in projects. Also fwiw, Inmos people always considered the CPUs to be general purpose.
- jecel 4y agoJust a guess, but before everybody adopted ARM the ST20 that was inherited from Inmos was ST's high end microprocessor, though they had a bunch of other families with 8 bits and such.
- 01100011 4y agoNot sure. It's been too long (20 years... Damn). I forget if they needed the horsepower for video decompression or if they had dedicated hw for that. It was definitely before ARM took over that space. ARM was still competing against MIPS, SuperH, Power, etc.