Chromatic Research

Chromatic Research Inc. was a company based in Mountain View, California, that developed a multifunction multimedia device for PCs called the MPACT!

was a programmable VLIW and SIMD media processor that implemented a video, audio and modem device.

The purpose of the solution was to be a single chip or add-in card that removed the need for separate graphics, audio and modem devices.

The chip could DMA data into contiguous SRAM entries asynchronously with other ALU operations which made the design very parallel and able to absorb the long latencies of RAMBUS's RDRAM while sustaining high throughput.

So even though the DVD standard was established after the creation of the MPACT!, a decoder solution was developed without impact on the chip design.

In a press release, the company claimed to make the first device capable of sustaining a billion operations per second (a "BOP").

However these discussions did not bear fruit as Chromatic underestimated the importance of 3D, and 3DFX decided to invest a lot of time and energy to integrate 2D into their Voodoo line of GPUs.