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Re: Cheap DSP cards (PCI) and drivers

I don't understand how one can compare altivec to a DSP: they have completely different purposes.

Not necessarily. Altivec is a dedicated vector execution unit whereas a DSP is a logic circuit specifically designed to perform certain functions in silicon as opposed to performing them in software. One can perform certain operations in Altivec that you could perform in DSP, but the reverse is not true.

The DSP is perhaps better compared to a RISC processor, since it does most things in a single cycle, 

?????  Wha...?

but no DSP that I know of has the parallel processing capabilities of altivec and many (such as the one on the NeXT) don't do floating point. One the other hand, one can do digital signal processing very nicely using altivec, but that would be under-utilizing its capabilities, in my opinion.

I wonder if you are confusing certain issues. Certainly Altivec is much more flexible than a dedicated DSP circuit, but one is not able to perform all functions that one might want to with respect to signal processing and Altivec.

Does this "Photoshop" card have a PCI version?

Well, the ones I used were NUBUS and manufactured by RADIUS as I recall, and I believe that eventually that business dried up when primary CPU's became powerful enough to perform many of these tasks in software without waiting hours to days for certain tasks to complete. The Photoshop accelerator card I had contained (I think) three or four dedicated DSP's for specific filter functions etc... and was remarkably quick.



Bryan





Bryan William Jones
email@hidden
University of Utah School of Medicine
Moran Eye Center  Rm 3407
75 N. Medical Dr.
Salt Lake City, Utah 84132
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/
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