🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Wells writes:
[A lot of good applications for a Digital Signal Processor]
 
Except..
 
>Co-Processor.  Programs should be able to use it as a secondary processor
>to speed up a lot of operations.  (e.g.  A MUCH enhanced blitter etc.)


A DSP has a VERY limited instruction set, highly optimized toward
multiply and shift operations, the kinds of things you'd want
to do to a stream of real-time signals (ie: audio or video)
 
It CAN'T do the things a math-coprocessor can do, so its use
as a "co-processor" would be extremely limited.
 
It would be almost worthless as a graphics blitter in addition
because it has a limited memory space available to it, and has
no direct access to video memory.  All I/O would have to be done
over the bus, ie, too slow for much use as a graphics blitter.
 
>Parallel processing (ahem 8-)  Running (from memory) 3 processes in
>parallel (at the same time).  Giving high quality multi-tasking
>capabilities if it's used correctly!

Only if the process (DSPs don't multitask, it would be pointless
on a chip designed for highspeed manipulation of data streams)
was something useful.  If it was doing something like processing
video data while the main CPU ran something else, it could
be called parallel processing, but you couldn't do anything like
running two general purpose programs in parallel.
 
(DSPs could of course be run in parallel, if the computer was
designed to handle more than one.)
 
All the other applications mentioned would make good use of
the specialized power of the DSP.
 
BobR