in 1983, proved to be an even bigger success. It was based on the Harvard architecture, and so had separate instruction and data memory. It already had a special instruction set, with instructions like load-and-accumulate or multiply-and-accumulate. It could work on 16-bit numbers and needed 390 ns for a multiply-add operation. TI is now the market leader in general-purpose DSPs.

About five years later, the second generation of DSPs began to spread. They had 3 memories for storing two operands simultaneously and included hardware