[Gllug] Advice on getting on the career ladder for c and linux

[Nix]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2003, formi at blueyonder.co.uk uttered the following:
> On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Nix wrote:
>> (The MAS3587F inside the MP3-playing box next to me , for instance, has
>> 4K of code memory, 4K of `coefficient' memory (i.e. data space), 256
>> registers, and if I read the data sheet right[1], has assembler
>> instructions to do things like Fourier analysis. I doubt many C
>> compilers would know how to use *that* instruction, but its use is
>> absolutely critical to the sort of code one writes on there...)
> 
>  I'm a person who likes to be minimalistic, (even my manners are),
>  but can I be told why those chips use that minute amount of memory,
>  knowing about prices of hardware nowadays...

Normally price (DSPs are cheap hardware), power consumption, chip space
concerns (that RAM is *on the chip* --- and the chip does an immense
amount of other stuff from realtime mixing and bass boosting through to
power supply and clock supply for other chips.

>  I can come out with several possible reason, but I'll refrain from
>  becaming the laughing stock of the list for just this once..

DSPs specialize in blazing speed at a few specific operations (and some
also do low-power-consumption). They have to be cheap, and usually have
very strange and specialized instructions.

4K often *is* enough; e.g. the MP3-encoding layer fits in there, as does
(according to the data sheet) an encoder optimized for compressing
speech. (But you have to buy that separately and I don't have it.)

-- 
#ifdef USE_ISPTS_FLAG
		} else {	/* else pty, not pts */
#endif

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