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I worked on a bunch of MPEG-2 encoder and decoder designs using the i960CF and i960RP when I was at Optivision. Here's a photo of an MPEG-2 encoder (found on E-

by drmpeg 3y ago

I worked on a bunch of MPEG-2 encoder and decoder designs using the i960CF and i960RP when I was at Optivision. Here's a photo of an MPEG-2 encoder (found on E-bay) that used the i960CF and a PCI interface chip designed specifically for the i960CA/CF, the PLX PCI9060. https://www.w6rz.net/opti.jpg https://www.w6rz.net/opti.jpg With all the interest in retro computing these days, I wish I had kept more stuff from the 80's and 90's. Here's all I have left, an i960CA-16 chip from a development board that I had replaced with an i960CF and a manual. https://www.w6rz.net/i960ca.png https://www.w6rz.net/i960ca.png https://www.w6rz.net/i960camanual.png https://www.w6rz.net/i960camanual.png

drmpeg 3y ago
I found another item that I hung onto. A CD with the i960 tools including gcc (looks like it's gcc 2.7.2). Also has a bunch of manuals in PDFs. https://www.w6rz.net/IQ80960RXK5_2.iso https://www.w6rz.net/IQ80960RXK5_2.iso 105,078,784 bytes.
- kens 3y ago
  That's a nice collection of documents on the i960 RM and RN chips.
mips_r4300i 3y ago
That's pretty neat. I enjoy seeing first-gen designs like this, before everything gets integrated down to one chip. No shortage of PLDs and dual port ram on there. And not one but two CL4040 encoders from C-Cube. What was the reason for having both a i960 lacking a FPU along a probably much more powerful TMS320? Was PCI in general a weak point of the dsp chip and a strong point of the 960?
- drmpeg 3y ago
  The CL4040 had two CL4020 chips in the package. It took four chips to encode 1/2 D1 resolution (352x480), so this was the smallest MPEG-2 encoder possible at the time (1995). The TMS320 chip was the audio encoder and was only capable of MPEG-1 Layer 2 coding. The i960 was primarily used for bitstream multiplexing, either Transport Stream or Program Stream. The idea was to offload the host so that you could have many encoders in a cheap PC (with a big power supply).

by drmpeg 3y ago

drmpeg 3y ago

I found another item that I hung onto. A CD with the i960 tools including gcc (looks like it's gcc 2.7.2). Also has a bunch of manuals in PDFs. https://www.w6rz.net/IQ80960RXK5_2.iso https://www.w6rz.net/IQ80960RXK5_2.iso 105,078,784 bytes.

kens 3y ago
That's a nice collection of documents on the i960 RM and RN chips.

mips_r4300i 3y ago

That's pretty neat. I enjoy seeing first-gen designs like this, before everything gets integrated down to one chip. No shortage of PLDs and dual port ram on there. And not one but two CL4040 encoders from C-Cube. What was the reason for having both a i960 lacking a FPU along a probably much more powerful TMS320? Was PCI in general a weak point of the dsp chip and a strong point of the 960?

drmpeg 3y ago
The CL4040 had two CL4020 chips in the package. It took four chips to encode 1/2 D1 resolution (352x480), so this was the smallest MPEG-2 encoder possible at the time (1995). The TMS320 chip was the audio encoder and was only capable of MPEG-1 Layer 2 coding. The i960 was primarily used for bitstream multiplexing, either Transport Stream or Program Stream. The idea was to offload the host so that you could have many encoders in a cheap PC (with a big power supply).