New Chips on the Block

April 1997 / Reviews / This Hand-Held Stands Out / New Chips on the Block

The Velo 1 uses Philips' own PR31500 and UCB1100, a pair of CPU chips that provide excellent computing power at low cost. The PR31500 is a 40-MHz, 3.3-V version of the Mips R3000 RISC chip with an additional DSP unit for doing computations common in telecommunications. This allows it to run the main machine as well as act as a modem or audio recorder. The UCB1100 contains the codec for telephone-line interfacing, and it can be turned off w hen not in use. The PR31500 also contains the first type of code compression offered by Mips that can save memory. No NOPs are needed, because the pipeline can stall until information from a load or branch is available.

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Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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