Len Wrote:
>I appreciate the verve, enthusiasm, and good intentions with
>which you made that statement but 5 years ago was 1997 and
>computers were a lot more powerful than you give them credit for
>being. Unless you have some good, recognized references for a
>statement like that, you shouldn't make it.
>
>Len
Ahhhh, I love a good challenge!
First, a disclaimer: comparing a 1997 Pentium II desktop computer to a
digital camera is sort of an apples-to-oranges comparison. The camera won't
play Doom, doesn't run a web-browser, and can't balance your checkbook. On
the other hand, the 1997 Pentium II can't fit in a pocket, take a picture,
then display it on your TV. Also, it's hard to compare desktop memory to
digital camera memory because the're used for very different things, and
because big flash memories (like 256 MByte CompactFlash cards) didn't even
exist in 1997.
I was really making two points:
o) Sleek little digital cameras hide a deceptively
large amount of processing power.
o) Moore's law gave us about a 10x increase in processing
power over the last 5 years, and will continue to
march on (at least for the next few years).
Ok, let's at least compare processing power:
I bopped over to the SPEC website (www.spec.org) to get the state of the PC
art in early 1997. A quick search of the SPEC95 results showed that in
April 1997 Intel tested their PD440FX motherboard with Pentium II processors
ranging in clock rate from 233 to 300 MHz, all with 64 MBytes of RAM.
That's probably a pretty good snapshot of cutting-edge PC's from early 1997.
Per the Texas Instruments website, the HP Photosmart 315 (a $300 digital
camera using 2001 technology) is equipped with the TI TMS320DSC21 camera
processor. The DSC21 has a C5000 fixed-point DSP core, an ARM7 32-bit RISC
processor core, and a bunch of other stuff including memory controller, USB
controller, etc., all in one chip. TI doesn't have a product bulletin for
this processor on their website, but they do have a product bulletin for the
TMS320DSC24, a related product. Here it is:
http://focus.ti.com/pdfs/vf/vidimg/dsc24_prodbull.pdf
The DSC24 bulletin states that the DSP subsystem is a 500 MIPS system, which
indicates that the DSC24 chip is clocked somewhere in the hundreds of MHz.
I can't find performance numbers for the DSC21, but I'm guessing they're
either equal or perhaps 1/2 that of the DSC24.
Both TI chips will run Nucleus, VxWorks, or Linux. Based on my experience
coding signal processing algorithms for DSP's and general-purpose
microprocessors, I'd bet that the DSC24 will perform signal and image
processing tasks about as fast or maybe faster than a 300 MHz Pentium II. A
lot of the speed issues depend on memory access times and throughput.
Typical still camera image processing algorithms include Bayer pattern
interpolation, sharpening algorithms, JPEG compression, PAL or NTSC video
coding, etc.
We can get into a debate about the details, but I think I'm pretty solid in
saying that the computational power of the TI still camera DSP's is at least
comparable to an early 1997 Pentium II box.
--Mark
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