🚀 go-pugleaf

Donald.Kennedy@bbs.oit.unc.edu (Donald Kennedy) writes:

>I have read recently that SGI has chosen not to provide direct programming
>support for the onboard 56001 on its Indigo computer. Does anyone know
>what kind of audio DSP support SGI is planning for the Indigo other than
>digital audio recording/playback (including multiple channel I/O)?

In a response to a similar question in comp.sys.sgi (where this really
belongs, not in comp.dsp!), someone from SGI wrote this (quoted
without permission):

|There are a number of reasons why we don't allow folks to directly 
|program the DSP. Among these are:
|        1) The DSP may go away in future machines, and we don't want
|           people to write code that we won't be supporting.
|        2) Almost all of the bandwidth of the DSP is taken up 
|           getting audio in and out of the machine. There really
|           isn't much left that a user application could use.
|
|Really, we'd rather encourage people to write well-tuned MIPS code.
|Then you get portability both across current platforms, and to new
|machines as they come out. The development environment for MIPS
|code is also much better. Finally, the MIPS, particularly the R4K,
|is MUCH faster than the DSP for most things; this isn't like the
|original NeXT, where you needed to program the DSP because the host
|CPU was dog-slow.
|
|        -Doug
|
|
|Doug Cook       (cook@sgi.com)          |    "What IS Digital Media?    
|Software Engineer, Digital Media Group  |    ...another name for graphics."
|Silicon Graphics, Inc.                  |

--Guido van Rossum, CWI, Amsterdam <guido@cwi.nl>
"It's spelled Raymond Luxury-Yacht but it's pronounced Throat-Wobbler
Mangrove."