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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 th

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).