OT: Re: porting linux to DSP

Bjorn Wesen (bjorn@sparta.lu.se)
Wed, 28 Jul 1999 23:20:00 +0200 (MET DST)


On Wed, 28 Jul 1999, Marc Mutz wrote:
> * c't magazine project: MP3 decoder. Uses DSP (10MHz, iirc). You want to
> tell me that a 10Mhz K7 can do this?

it doesn't have to. the k7 (or whatever) is already in the computer. if
you want to make something that _only_ can do mp3 decoding you would
of course not use a k7, but mainly for the price not for the performance
loss.

i've done a dsp based mp3 decoder:
http://www.sparta.lu.se/~bjorn/whitney/

i've also done the same thing on a pentium, and the pentium beats the dsp
hands down by several orders of magnitude of course. at the same clock
speed, the dsp would win but not by any large margin (i'm not talking
about monster dsp's here like the texas c6x/c7x). mainly the dsp can do a
multiply and accumulate in one cycle while the pentium probably requires
two, and the dsp often has 4/5-way on-chip memory banks.

a 3d accelerator is not a dsp by any stretch of the imagination, and it
isn't programmable either so that's hardly a good example.

this is severely off-topic for linux-kernel so i'm killing this now..

-bjorn

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