🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1jn4dn$lbf@agate.berkeley.edu> jbuck@forney.berkeley.edu writes:
>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?".

I think you're being a bit harsh on the paper.  It's hard to argue with their
numbers.

I think the essense of the debate is what is DSP?  I remember salivating over
the multiply instruction on the original Intel 2920 data sheets.  Back then
if you wanted a cheap multiplies you had to use DSP chips.  My how things
have changed.

I think that the DEC paper shows two things.  1) You don't have to use a DSP
chip to get fast multiplies any more and 2) as SGI and NeXT have discovered,
DSP chips don't have much work to do in a workstation.

Admittedly DEC's ALPHA implementation wasn't optimized for low power (rumor
has it that the clock distribution alone accounts for a large part of the 
power.)    But think what would happen if they did.......

Is there anything inherently power hungry and expensive on the current 
RISC chips?  The RISC chips that I'm familiar with do 64 and 80 bit IEEE
floating point.  That's one item that embedded RISC chips can do away with.
Virtual memory support is another.  Are caches that much more power hungry
than large on-chip memory?  What else is left?  A 32 bit IEEE floating point
multiply has to be the same cost.

Still hoping that someday I don't have to program my DSP algorithms in 
assembly language....

							Malcolm Slaney
							Apple ATG