DSP

[Ian J]

I'm no hardware technician, but how can a piece of kit be sold without drivers/schematics/whatever is needed to use it?


I keep seeing posts that the DSP is the key and when it's harnessed youtube will play fine at 360p+, 720p video will run ok etc.


Whats the hold up? Will the DSP ever be used?


At the moment I really fancy a Pandora but the UK price is a bit near the knuckle (especially now I have a smart phone that covers my internet browsing fix)


If the DSP was used would we suddenly see major speed increases in emulators?


As it is I’m checking here regularly for updates, but also have one eye on the Sony NGP


Ian

 

[Caine]

If the DSP was used would we suddenly see major speed increases in emulators?

No, not really. At least not automatically. Each of the emulators would need to be updated individually to support the DSP. Even if it was accessible right now, it still depends on what can be offloaded onto the DSP.


I expect audio and video decoding to see the most notable benefit.

 

[Ian J]

Sorry, I did realise there would need to be changes in the code, I just wondered if it would make much of a speed increase.

 

[WizardStan]

I'm no hardware technician, but how can a piece of kit be sold without drivers/schematics/whatever is needed to use it?

The drivers are available, but they're only compatible with the .37 kernel (and maybe back ported to a little earlier, .34 I think I figured I could do). Unfortunately, other things in the Pandora has drivers which need to be updated to work with such later kernels, which is why we are currently stuck on .27. Last I heard, Notaz, kernel wizard extraordinaire that he is, is working on an updated kernel that'll pretty much allow the DSP to just drop right in and become automatically useful to anything that knows how. But that's probably still a few months away, and I shouldn't really make promises for other devs when I can't even keep my own projects on track. >.>

If the DSP was used would we suddenly see major speed increases in emulators?

No. DSP stands for Digital Signal Processing. It is designed for taking a continuous stream of data as input and producing a continuous stream of data as output: input an MP3, and it can output raw wave data; input an h264 stream and it outputs raw video data. It is very good at doing this by being worse at doing other things. There is no doubt some things that an emulator can offload to the DSP (such as audio playback, I know the FM emulator in DosBox is very CPU intensive and would make an excellent candidate for the DSP)


Currently, only two things I know of will make use of the DSP when it becomes available: Flash for youtube playback, and mplayer for video playback (assuming I'm remembering correctly that it has already been updated and I didn't just imagine it)

 

[gotwake424]

In all honesty, the DSP is a crucial part of the pandora hardware! Especially since the 500mhz processor is starting to become dwarfed by the snapdragon and the A4 just to name some.


To the OP team I know that you guys are EXTREMELY busy! That being said there should be at least one or two members constantly working on software for the device and not just the hardware. (please inform me if this is not the case?)


The community here is great but patches from multiple different people on different boards..gp32x/openpandora.org can only go so far when they have to be searched for, downloaded etc....


just my little rant and vent

 

[CAZMIESTER]

Is this a sticky subject or what if my mind serves me right earlier ti dsp chips were used to handle code a good example being the tms 34010 used in narc mortal kombat etc, could the TMS320C64x+ not be used in the same way?.

 

[Exophase]

Inability to use the DSP has nothing to do with lack of hardware knowledge, it's the software ecosystem that has problems with it. The options at the moment boil down to using a closed source binary blob that has an OS running on the DSP (and is therefore kind of bloated) or using an open source module that requires giving up a fixed amount of memory to the DSP at boot time. Whichever is decided is something that Pandora may well be stuck with. So the developers have been rightfully hesitant to move forward on this.


And I've said this before a lot but it's my belief that the DSP could be used for far more than just audio and video decoding. It has a pretty general purpose processor that's good at data parallel stuff and not as good at branchy stuff. But emulators are difficult to parallelize to begin with so I wouldn't expect to see lots of people jumping to offload stuff to it.

 

[Ian J]

Many thanks for the replies guys, this has cleared up quite a few things for me.

 

[gotwake424]

The point is that not only should the opt be working on hardware, there should be a dedicated team working on software. Not just the community! Hardware is only useful when paired with the right software.


Thank you notaz for trying to bring an updated kernel. Maybe we could start a donation to speed this along?

 

[renegadechic]

The point is that not only should the opt be working on hardware, there should be a dedicated team working on software. Not just the community!

actually, this is already the case. specific people (i dont know if it could exactly be described as a dedicated team but it is certainly select individuals) from the community are working with Craig and ED on the default software, be it kernel, pnd related things, wifi things. the biggest thing though is that everyone has day jobs and their own projects going alongside everything and all the work on the pandora software is for the love of it at the moment. i don't know where the team stand on people joining the cause but i expect they are open to offers. this will only happen though as more people get their hands on units.

 

[mahousaru]

The point is that not only should the opt be working on hardware, there should be a dedicated team working on software. Not just the community! Hardware is only useful when paired with the right software.

Dedicated team.... Hmmm maybe Nokia can learn something from this and fix the front facing camera on the N900!!!

 

[Esn]

Thank you notaz for trying to bring an updated kernel. Maybe we could start a donation to speed this along?

http://pandorawiki.org/Donations


http://pandorawiki.org/Pandora_Bounties