HITACHI AND EQUATOR PUSH MULTIMEDIA PROCESSOR.

Hitachi Ltd and Equator Technologies Inc have announced a programmable media processor platform that they aim to make the "de facto standard" in multimedia. The MAP1000 is designed to replace hard-wired imaging systems by integrating high-performance imaging into an advanced very-long instruction word VLIW CPU. This sounds ominously similar to the Mpact processor whose development was halted by Chromatic Research in July this year amid reports that it was hard to program (CI No 3,448). Samsung Electronics also ditched its multimedia signal processing chip and Philips moved away from the PC market with its TriMedia part. Equator and Hitachi say they offer developers rapid time to market with a complete suite of development tools and reference applications. They see a market in a wide variety of products including set-top boxes, high definition digital TVs and video editors.