🚀 go-pugleaf

Bob_BobR_Retelle@cup.portal.com writes:
: [...] 
: 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.

Ermm... If you're talking about DSPs in general, have a look at the
DSP96K first, and tell me if it can do what a math coprocessor can
do or not! :-) BTW, I have quite a few assembly examples for the 56K
for floating point operations etc.

: 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.

[I assume you mean the DSP56001 in the Falcon here]

True, for moving around large amounts of memory it's useless - on
the other hand, since the transfer rate to main memory is approximately
1Mb/s (haven't tested it myself), it would do for very complex graphics
operations, such as eg. Phong shading in several frames (5-10) per
second (eg. in 320x240x64K).

: >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!

3 processes in parallel??? Since when?

: 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.

Well, noone was talking about *general purpose* processes. But it would
be very useful eg. for compressing data in the background, playing a 
Tracker-module without wasting CPU time etc.

: (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.

-MY