🚀 go-pugleaf

I would have let this one drop, but since a DEC employee wants to
bring it up again ...

In article <1993Jan21.172924.1979@rdg.dec.com> jpt@salama.fno.dec.com (Jari Tavi) writes:
>As a beginning, my personal opinion: I don't think that DSP's are
>obsolete.

Good for you.

>Cost, power consumtion and such other things are something that you
>could try asking if or when they are addressed by Alpha AXP. 21064
>will not be the only implementation...

TI, Motorola, and Analog Devices, as well as several Japanese companies,
have usable products for embedded real-time DSP available now (and for
much of the last decade).  If DEC is planning something in the future,
good for you, but the paper appeared to be an effort for DEC to excuse
itself for not being in the DSP market by claiming (falsely) that current
products were obsolete and that we should all switch to the Alpha.

>There's nothing in Alpha AXP architecture itself which conflicts with this.
>I do agree that 21064 as we see it today may not be something one would use
>in cellular phone or something similar, but Alpha isn't bad in issues like
>memory bandwith, context switches or interrupt latencies either... 

Yes, you can make a hell of a workstation with a 21064.  But are you
implying that DEC plans to enter the DSP market with an Alpha-based
product?  Somehow, I doubt it, not unless DEC wishes to lose even *more*
money.  I think that, if the paper from DEC's Cambridge research lab and
your comments are any indication, I suggest that DEC stick to markets it
knows something about.  The Alpha looks like a very fine design, something
to be proud of.  But it isn't good for everything.

Embedded real-time DSP isn't about very high performance number crunching
(except, of course, when it is).  It's about just enough number crunching
power to get the job done, with a design that makes it easy to verify that
real-time constraints are met (that is, you can count cycles accurately
and know that that is exactly how many cycles the operation will take).
It's about putting the whole system on a very small number of chips, or
on one chip (example: if you make a call that goes over a satellite
link, you're probably talking through a chip that implements the LMS
echo cancellation algorithm).  Lots of times, these things are ASICs
with a programmable DSP core.

>If you have need for High Performance embedded/real Time systems, please
>contact sales for product directions. Also Aeon has already implemented
>worlds fastest single boarder based on Alpha AXP :-)

If you're after getting the job done with products that are available
today, contact Motorola, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, or any of
a half dozen other companies who understand the DSP market and don't
go around publishing poorly conceived papers like "Are DSP Chips Obsolete?".



--
Joe Buck	jbuck@ohm.berkeley.edu