MicroUnity
MicroUnity Systems Engineering, Inc. was a private company located in Los Altos, California and an early developer of broadband microprocessor technologies licensed widely across digital media industries. Founders and Funding MicroUnity was founded in 1988 by John Moussouris, a physicist trained at Harvard University and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University who had co-founded MIPS Computer Systems. The Chief Architect was Craig Hansen, who used to be Chief Architect at MIPS and NeXT. An early investor was Moussouris’ Harvard classmate William Randolph Hearst III, the publishing and media executive who became a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins. In the early 1990s, MicroUnity was backed by over $100 million from companies like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Motorola, and telecommunications leaders like Time Warner and John Malone at Tele-Communications Inc. Early media processing technology The company’s main focus was a programmable media processor chip and assoc ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Media Processor
A media processor, mostly used as an image/video processor, is a microprocessor-based system-on-a-chip which is designed to deal with digital streaming data in real-time (e.g. display refresh) rates. These devices can also be considered a class of digital signal processors (DSPs). Unlike graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used for computer displays, media processors are targeted at digital televisions and set-top boxes. The streaming digital media classes include: * uncompressed video * compressed digital video - e.g. MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 * digital audio- e.g. PCM, AAC Such SOCs are composed of: * a microprocessor optimized to deal with these media datatypes * a memory interface * streaming media interfaces * specialized functional units to help deal with the various digital media codecs The microprocessor might have these optimizations: * vector processing or SIMD functional units to efficiently deal with these media datatypes * DSP-like features Previous to med ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Los Altos, California
Los Altos (; Spanish for "The Heights") is a city in Santa Clara County, California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 31,625 according to the 2020 census. Most of the city's growth occurred between 1950 and 1980. Originally an agricultural town with many summer cottages and apricot orchards, Los Altos is now an affluent bedroom community on the western edge of Silicon Valley, serving as a major source of commuters to other parts of Silicon Valley. Los Altos strictly limits commercial zones to the downtown area and small shopping and office parks lining Foothill Expressway and El Camino Real. History The area was originally called "Banks and Braes". Paul Shoup, an executive of the Southern Pacific Railroad, and his colleagues formed the Altos Land Company in 1906 and started the development of Los Altos. The company acquired of land from Sarah Winchester. Shoup wanted to link Palo Alto and Los Gatos by making Los Altos a commuter town. It continued a train- ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Time Warner
Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States. It was originally established in 1972 by Steve Ross as Warner Communications, and Time Warner was created in 1990, following a merger between Time Inc. and the original Warner Communications. The company has film, television and cable operations, with its assets including WarnerMedia Studios & Networks (consisting of the entertainment assets of Turner Broadcasting, HBO, and Cinemax as well as Warner Bros., which itself consists of the film, animation, television studios, the company's home entertainment division and Studio Distribution Services, its joint venture with Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, DC Comics, New Line Cinema, and, together with CBS Entertainment Group, through its Warner Bros. Entertainment subsidiary, a 50% interest in The CW television network); Warne ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Companies Established In 1988
A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared goals. Companies take various forms, such as: * voluntary associations, which may include nonprofit organizations * business entities, whose aim is generating profit * financial entities and banks * programs or educational institutions A company can be created as a legal person so that the company itself has limited liability as members perform or fail to discharge their duty according to the publicly declared incorporation, or published policy. When a company closes, it may need to be liquidated to avoid further legal obligations. Companies may associate and collectively register themselves as new companies; the resulting entities are often known as corporate groups. Meanings and definitions A company can be defined as an "artificial per ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Companies Based In Santa Clara, California
A company, abbreviated as co., is a legal entity representing an association of people, whether natural, legal or a mixture of both, with a specific objective. Company members share a common purpose and unite to achieve specific, declared goals. Companies take various forms, such as: * voluntary associations, which may include nonprofit organizations * business entities, whose aim is generating profit * financial entities and banks * programs or educational institutions A company can be created as a legal person so that the company itself has limited liability as members perform or fail to discharge their duty according to the publicly declared incorporation, or published policy. When a company closes, it may need to be liquidated to avoid further legal obligations. Companies may associate and collectively register themselves as new companies; the resulting entities are often known as corporate groups. Meanings and definitions A company can be defined as an "artificial per ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system developed in the early 1980s. First developed in 1986 and released in 1987, SPARC was one of the most successful early commercial RISC systems, and its success led to the introduction of similar RISC designs from many vendors through the 1980s and 1990s. The first implementation of the original 32-bit architecture (SPARC V7) was used in Sun's Sun-4 computer workstation and server systems, replacing their earlier Sun-3 systems based on the Motorola 68000 series of processors. SPARC V8 added a number of improvements that were part of the SuperSPARC series of processors released in 1992. SPARC V9, released in 1993, introduced a 64-bit architecture and was first released in Sun's UltraSPARC processors in 1995. Later, SPARC processors were used in symm ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS), and SPARC microprocessors. Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Notable Sun acquisitions include Cray Business Systems Division, Storagetek, and ''Innotek GmbH'', creators of VirtualBox. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982. At its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California (part of Silicon Valley), on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. Sun products included computer servers and workstations built on its own RISC-based SPARC processor architecture, as well as on x86-based AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors. Sun also developed its own ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Pentium Pro
The Pentium Pro is a sixth-generation x86 microprocessor developed and manufactured by Intel and introduced on November 1, 1995. It introduced the P6 microarchitecture (sometimes termed i686) and was originally intended to replace the original Pentium in a full range of applications. While the Pentium and Pentium MMX had 3.1 and 4.5 million transistors, respectively, the Pentium Pro contained 5.5 million transistors. Later, it was reduced to a more narrow role as a server and high-end desktop processor and was used in supercomputers like ASCI Red, the first computer to reach the trillion ''floating point operations per second'' (teraFLOPS) performance mark. The Pentium Pro was capable of both dual- and quad-processor configurations. It only came in one form factor, the relatively large rectangular Socket 8. The Pentium Pro was succeeded by the Pentium II Xeon in 1998. Microarchitecture The lead architect of Pentium Pro was Fred Pollack who was specialized in supe ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
BiCMOS
Bipolar CMOS (BiCMOS) is a semiconductor technology that integrates two semiconductor technologies, those of the bipolar junction transistor and the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) logic gate, into a single integrated circuit. In more recent times the bipolar processes have been extended to include high mobility devices using silicon–germanium junctions. Bipolar transistors offer high speed, high gain, and low output impedance with relatively high power consumption per device, which are excellent properties for high-frequency analog amplifiers including low noise radio frequency (RF) amplifiers that only use a few active devices, while CMOS technology offers high input impedance and is excellent for constructing large numbers of low-power logic gates. In a BiCMOS process the doping profile and other process features may be tilted to favour either the CMOS or the bipolar devices. For example GlobalFoundries offer a basic 180 nm BiCMOS7WL process and several ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Set-top Boxes
A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of signal, turning the source signal into content in a form that can then be displayed on the television screen or other display device. They are used in cable television, satellite television, and over-the-air television systems as well as other uses. According to the ''Los Angeles Times'', the cost to a cable provider in the United States for a set-top box is between $150 for a basic box to $250 for a more sophisticated box. In 2016, the average pay-TV subscriber paid $231 per year to lease their set-top box from a cable service provider. TV signal sources The signal source might be an Ethernet cable, a satellite dish, a coaxial cable (see cable television), a telephone line (including DSL connections), broadband over power lines (BPL), or ev ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Tele-Communications Inc
Tele-Communications, Inc. (TCI) was a cable television provider in the United States, and for most of its history was controlled by Bob Magness and John Malone. The company was started in 1958 in Bozeman, Montana as Western Microwave, Inc. and Community Television, Inc., two firms with common ownership. The companies merged in 1968 and operations moved to Denver, taking the name Tele-Communications Inc. It was the largest cable operator in the United States at one time. After going public in 1970, the company grew rapidly, and became the top cable provider in the United States. After a failed merger attempt with Bell Atlantic in 1994, it was purchased in 1999 by AT&T, whose cable television assets in select markets were later acquired by Charter Communications, Cox Communications, and then Cablevision and Comcast Corporation. History After graduating from Southwestern Oklahoma State University, Bob Magness was a cotton seed salesman and cattle rancher. In 1956, he met two men ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
John Malone
John Carl Malone (born March 7, 1941) is an American billionaire businessman, landowner and philanthropist. He was chief executive officer (CEO) of Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), a cable and media giant, for twenty-four years from 1973 to 1996. Malone is now chairman and largest voting shareholder of Liberty Media, Liberty Global, and Qurate Retail Group (formerly known as Liberty Interactive), and also owns 7% of Lionsgate and Starz Inc. He was interim CEO of Liberty Media, until succeeded by former Microsoft and Oracle CFO Greg Maffei. By most estimates, Malone is the largest private landowner in the United States, possessing upwards of 2.2 million acres (3,437 square miles), more than twice the size of Rhode Island. Early life and education John C. Malone was born on March 7, 1941 in Milford, Connecticut. His father was Daniel L. Malone, an engineer. Malone is of Irish heritage, his family originating in County Cork. Malone is a Catholic. In 1959, Malone graduated from Hopkin ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |