This doc may be helpful to have on hand to understand this post: http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/86/289/CSL-TR-86-289.pdf Integrated Information Technology or as that mouthful was abbreviated to: IIT (now 8x8) was founded by Chi-Shin Wang and Y.W. Sing two Weitek veterans. Its original product line was floating point coprocessors and lived in a niche before the giant sucking sound was heard of Intel vacuuming up peripherals such as floating point. At that point, a new product was needed. From 1989 a small group was working on a Vision Processor (VP). This SIMD(4) engine took a year or so to build. Its first customer was Compression Labs (CLI). The VP had a large reg file 64 16bit regs times 4 SIMD instances. This was so CLI could execute the 16x16 DCT. An 8x8 DCT is far more modest in reg consumption. Another customer for the part was AT&T with the videophone 2500 in 1992. So at this point, IIT had a reasonable video business with customers that had appl...