In the mid ninties, Apple, like car manufacturers, started to give their computers names that are totally meaningless yet sound important. Thus the Centris, a family of Macs sold by Apple that placed somewhere betwen the high-end Quadra line and the consumer level Performa. The name was later dropped and merged into the Quadra line. The later models included a DSP that was used to drive digital video circuitry, a software modem implementation (see GeoPort) and provide voice recognition. The power of this DSP was eclipsed by the introduction of the PowerMac which was said to have enough CPU power to replace the DSP in software. Needless to say, they didn't.