To: Time Traveler who wrote (49291 ) 2/11/1999 5:28:00 PM From: Tenchusatsu Read Replies (1) | Respond to
<So you were interested in DSPs in college. What type and on what aspect of research have you done with DSPs? How much do you know about DSPs and processors to suspect a difficult integration? Before 486 days, the engineers were saying that about math coprocessors. That mentality drove Weitek out of business, did it not?>controller and a DSP, because a DSP is just too specific and works too differently to be integrated onto a general-purpose processor. Math coprocessors are different, because the basic concept was the same as a processor, which was to take two operands and apply an operation on them.act like a DSP, taking a digital signal stream from some sort of device, performing DSP-like functions on it, then passing the filtered stream back to the device. One such use of this sort of trick is the so-called soft-modem, where most of the signal processing is done by software (device drivers), and the modem only serves as a dumb device which converts a telephone signal into a raw unfiltered data stream that can be sent up the PCI bus. Unfortunately, this isn't very reliable at the moment due to a lot of factors, from poor OS behavior (cough, cough, Windows 9x), to "bad PCI citizens," to poor chipset performance, etc. Neither is this approach very cost effective, considering that modems these days are pretty cheap already.
