| Subject: RE: Ideas on new Atari |
Author: Evan Langlois (67.187.51.187)
Date: 03-18-2005 08:18
Well, I've been tossing things back and forth as to the idea of a DSP. The newer coldfire processors at 266MHz should be able to decode jpegs just as fast as my Zaurus at 200Mhz, and likely quite a bit faster. Things were pretty much instant there. So, a DSP for doing jpegs doesn't really light me up - on a much slower CPU I'm sure its great stuff! However, for audio work, offloading even a couple of effects modules from the CPU to the DSP can make a world of difference. There is also a soundfont emulator for Linux, allowing any sound card to use soundfonts for MIDI ... that sounds like something I would love to port and offload to the DSP especially if the DSP can go ahead and play the audio without further interaction with the CPU. Considering that the Desse doesn't 96Khz/24 bit recording, its awefully tempting, but the price is still pretty high.
I wonder if there is a 56321 at 266Mhz Now, I know MIPS are pretty useless in the real world. However, if you see the DSP as a coprocessor to offload the burden from the CPU instead of as some sort of accelerator (like the jpeg code was supposed to do), then it could very well be pretty useful. Or maybe the DSP can do MPEG decompression while the CPU does scaling and YUV conversion for DVD playback :)
As for 30 bit color vs alpha channel. Lots of people will like the eye candy of alpha channel effects, and the 0.01% of the computer world that would benefit from 30 bit color is likely already using quite capable graphics cards on very fast workstations using very expensive proprietary software. I think that would be even tougher to get into than the audio market. Besides if you use 30 bit color, you likely are using a really BIG monitor and have lots of RAM too. Might be good for a super-atari desktop that going after the video market, but not for an embedded device. Come to think of it, the same video market that would use 30 bit color would likely use alpha channels too.
-- Evan
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