NEW YORK -- After nearly two years in the works, Intel Corp. and Analog Devices Inc. here today finally announced its long-awaited digital signal processor (DSP) architecture.
The codenamed Frio DSP, co-developed by both Intel and ADI, is being formally called the "Micro Signal Architecture (MSA)." The modular core itself is a fixed-point, 16-bit architecture that will initially run at speeds up to 300-MHz, said Ron Smith, vice president of the Wireless Communications & Computer Group at Intel.
In the future, the core will be optimized to run at speeds of 1-GHz, Smith said. "We call our device the Micro Signal Architecture, because it combines signal processing and the simplicity of microcontrollers," Smith said at a press event today.
The chip will have more than six times the performance than competitive products on the market, Smith said. Running at 336 million instructions per second, the device also features power-management and multimedia instruction sets.
At this event, the companies only announced the DSP architecture--not the merchant chips themselves. Both Intel and ADI will take this MSA-based core and develop separate chips based on this architecture, added Jerry Fishman, CEO of ADI.
In other words, Intel and ADI will develop their own DSP chips, which will not be pin-compatible, the companies said. First products are expected to hit the market from the respective companies in 2001.
"This is the next-generation architecture for ADI's DSP business," Fishman said at the event.
Intel, on the other hand, will not go after the general-purpose DSP market, Smith said. "We are going to use the DSP as an embedded part rather than a general-purpose DSP," he said. "Our focus is targeted at vertical applications like wireless handsets," he added.
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