[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> The point is that the ATRAC chip in the MD only has one task to perform and
> it is very good at it. The Pentium chip in the PC has a lot of tasks to
> *oversee* - it is not actually performing all of them, it has other systems
> to do that. The graphics card is handling the display, the sound card is
> handling processing sound (even 3D positioning in some cases) and there are
> also extra processor/controller chips handling other aspects of system
> operation. This means the main CPU isn't actually doing as much as you would
> think until you need to perform a lot more calculations - it spends a lot of
> time "idle". The effect of this is that it has a lot more "time" to spare on
> running intense calculations that you would expect it to. I still maintain
> that it is not impossible for a real-time or faster ATRAC encoder to be
> produced, I just wonder what the system specification would be in order for
> it to run fast enough. My reckoning is that the spec. would be a lot lower
> than some would have us believe.
>
> Magic
And all that is tied together with a 33Mhz PCI bus.... (Which has an
average performance of 33MB/s (PCI is ONLY fast when in burst mode. I/O with
soundcards etc. is single-byte based!, unless the CPU invokes DMA transfer, but
even then -in most cases-, the PCI bus is occupied and the CPU can't do
anything!)
Cheers,
Ralph -> Wondering at what speed the ATRAC-R-type DSP is running....
--
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Ralph Smeets Functional Verification Centre Of Competence - CMG
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"For many years, mankind lived just like the animals. And then
something happened that unleashed the powers of our imagination:
We learned to talk."
-- Stephen Hawking, later used by Pink Floyd --
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