In <lgibb.0fqd@burner.com> lgibb@burner.com (Lance Gibb) writes:
>If the chipset is capable of 7mb/sec, and assuming someone writes a page flipper that will take full advantage of that, AND assuming that SCSI II is indeed available early next year - we should be able to EASILY get 30fps animations from a 4 bitplane/hires/interlaced/overscan animation. DCTV uses those specs and a FULL overscan/interlace pic in DCTV takes up an average of 150k. 30fps would only require the chipset to handle 4.5mb/sec.
You wouldn't page flip but directly DMA to a double buffer in chip memory.
You'd also need a disk that delivers 4.5MB/s which is hard to find, you
can use 2 disks though if you can split that data onto both drives.
>Are there other limiting factors that I might be overlooking here? I am very excited about SCSI II and full 30fps animations and am saving my money for such a setup.
Well, you can have that with smaller resources. Look at the JPEG board(s)
that can compress/decompress in realtime.
>Lastly, just what is a DSP? I know it stands for Digital Signal Processor and is primarily used for sound, but what exactly does it do? And how would it be used in a video application?
A DSP has nothing to do with sound in the first place. It is a specialized
math engine which is optimized to run small algorithms on huge amounts of
data. This is indeed needed in real-time processing of audio signals but
can be used for nearly anything which needs heavy number crunching.
BTW, todays DSPs deliver about 100 MFLops peak (and average at about half that
speed). A lowly 25MHz 68040 does about 4-5 MFLOPs.
There are also dedicated DSP chipsets which are 3-5 times as fast but
which can't be programmed freely (f.e. Sharp has a chipset which handles
FFTs and convolutions). The MPEG chipsets can also be seen as a DSP for
