limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) (03/04/90)
WARNING: This is really long because I wanted to include a lot of detail. I'm really excited about this product. I have a BIG SCOOP for everyone. At the February JAUG (Jersey Amiga Users Group) meeting we were witness to a new product. I think this will be a real ground-breaking product for the Amiga; as I explain at the end of this article. The product was "The Bonsai 2000 DSP board" for the Amiga 2000 by John Cadona of Cadona Research & Engineering (CRE... pronounced like CRAY). After 2 years of research & development, this was the first public showing. Nutshell Review: ---------------- This board gives you either one or two DSPs in your Amiga 2000 computer (or A2500, or A2500/30, you get the hint). The DSP is the AT&T WE DSP 32C at 50MHz. You can have 0-256K RAM per DSP. (each DSP has 6K local RAM). The hardware interface is really well thought-out. The software interface is especially good. This should make the scientific and audio communities very interested in the Amiga. The price performance made this especially interesting. (see the end of this article) DSPs In General: ---------------- The talk began with an explanation of DSPs in general. A DSP (Digital Signal Processor) is a board that can do the high-speed calculations required to do sound manipulation. They were originally designed for telecommunications (digital phone systems, etc.). Of course, anything that can do such calculations can also be programmed to do calculations for other applications. So, a DSP in an Amiga (instead of a phone system) can be a next generation math-coprocessor. Though, that's really an insult to the chip. A "signal" is a sound-wave traveling down a wire. A computer translates that into a series of numbers to represent what the signal did over a period of time. If you can manipulate those numbers fast enough, you could manipulate the sound as it's happening (real-time manipulation). Amiga sound stores 8-bits for every "number" when it digitizes or plays sound. A CD player uses 16-bits (or 18 ...depending on how you think about it) per number. A CD player plays at 44.1MHz; this means that it records 44.1 million numbers per second! Now you understand why a DSP has to be able to do fast math. If you have an equation that will lower a sound 2 octaves and you want to do it in real-time; you need to do that equation 44.1 million times per second. DSPs store their numbers in different formats. The DSP used in the NeXT machine uses fixed-point numbers. The AT&T chip uses floating point (FP) numbers. This gives this chip an advantage because it can use a wider range of numbers. For example, 0dB is a whisper that can be barely heard by the human ear. 120dB is painful to humans. The floating point format that the AT&T WE 32C can hear BETTER than a human ear. It can hear a larger range and it can hear at a better resolution. How does a DSP do what it does? Here is a simplified description: If you have a 10-second sample you may have thousands of numbers. A DSP can perform the same calculation over each and every number at a blinding rate. This calculation can modify the signal or reach some aggregate statistic, etc. Most all wave theory requires such calculations as do other mathematical work. The AT&T WE 32c DSP Chip: ------------------------- Uses floating point (can "hear" better than a human). 6K of internal RAM right on the chip. External RAM helps performance. 2 internal processes can happen at once. If you want to multiply one sample by 5 and add the previous sample's value the DSP can start the next multiply while the current "add" is being performed. 12.5 MIPS. 25 MFLOPS. 16 Meg of RAM max. 16-bit parallel port. 16 megabaud serial port. Internal/external communication between different parts of the chip. Special FP format (single precision) but can convert to/from IEEE single precision on the fly. Since this chip is the choice of chips for scientists; and since it is *the* DSP chip used by AT&T/Bell-foo/Bell-frob researchers it has a C compiler, assembler, linker. It has application libraries, simulators/debuggers, etc. The application libraries are nice. Need to process an echo (reverb effect)? Just link to the correct application library can call the routine! Applications: ------------- John had a long list of possible applications. I'll try to list them here and explain some of the more interesting ones. Audio processing & manipulation (could be a VoiceMail processor). Sound synthesis (voice or music) -- Roland synth. quality. Spectral estimation & detection. Echo cancellation. Modulation/demodulation -- It can be a high-speed modem or FAX. Encryption. Filtering. MIDI Integration -- Play keyboard & have DSP work on the sound. VERY high-end audio -- More than CD-quality, so use an Amiga with a lot of RAM and a large hard drive as your audio studio. When you are done, submit it to a CD-manufacturer for pressing. Signal generator -- Generate any tone you want. Speech recognition (do the audio processing for your software). Imagine processing. Pattern Recognition. Servo-control/robotics. HAM Radio. Radar processing -- Could sample AM radio right off the antenna! Sonar processing. Personal super computing (more on that later). Mathematics modeling -- a current fad in the scientific industry. Data collection. Research. Education -- Use it's power to draw something that a student is trying to visualize. He gave one example of something that is difficult to understand, but if you see it animated in real-time it all comes clear. The animation requires the horse-power of a DSP. Graphics Applications: ---------------------- -- For use with graphics, the Bonsai2000 could do translation, scaling, rotations, shading, perspective and other data manipulations. These all require a lot of mathematical calculations that the DSP can do. -- Realistic scene generation will be more possible. Ray-tracing, radiosity ("glow"), and mapping & projectional methods are all math-intensive. Imaging wrapping an image around a 3D shape in an instant. -- Scientific Visualization often requires a CRAY. How many people would settle for 1/2 a CRAY all to themselves at this price instead of millions of dollars for a CRAY that they have to share with other researchers? -- ALMOST REAL-TIME RAY-TRACING. Ray-tracing is slow because it requires so much floating point math to be performed. This is what the DSP does well! The Card Itself: ---------------- John offered to pass the card around. After hearing it's price no body wanted to take responsibility of passing it person-to-person. It was pretty funny. I was impressed when I got hold of the card. The hardware is finished; no patches were showing on the board. I remember when the first RAM cards for the Amiga were released and AmigaWorld did a review of a bunch of them. They all had hand-soldered last-minute patches all over them except for the ASDG board, which looked completely professional. This card looked the same way. It looked like it had been in production for a while and was done by a very serious developer (which describes CRE). Configurations are flexible: You can vary the kind of performance you want based on how much you can afford to pay: -- 1 or 2 DSPs running at 50MHz. -- 0, 32, 64, 128, 256K RAM per DSP. -- Using PALs, you can reconfigure the memory map of the DSP. -- The less-expensive "DSP32" can also be used (slower performance). -- 8Kx8 or 32Kx8 SRAM (8- or 32-bit bus) 16-bit parallel interface to Amiga w/DMA access to all RAM memory and control registers. In other words, you can go "straight to the chip". Uses static RAM, 35ns. (as a comparison, 150ns RAM is used in the Amiga 1000). Runs in parallel with the Amiga. High-speed 32-bit bus on the card for communications between the components. You can plug boards into this 32-bit bus to (1) give the first DSP more memory (2) parallel access to other devices (3) add even more DSPs. An example of (2) was to add some kind of medical device to the bus so that the DSP can monitor an experiment or a patient. General I/O support via daughter boards: Personality modules on each DSP. Attach samplers, CDs, etc. Tightly couples sync & control via flexible interrupt system between all Bonsai subsystems and the Amiga. Demos: ------ He showed a sound-wave graph of his voice and his wife's voice (each person had said the same words) and we were able to see some differences that make voice recognition difficult. Another example (not shown, but talked about) was the voice print of "How do you reck a nice beach?" and "How do you recognize speech?" and how similar they are. That's why computer voice-recognition is a long time away. He held a microphone to one end of a slinky and dropped the other end. The graph generated by the Amiga showed how the slinky... ummm... slinked. When you use your ear for this experiment, so many sounds happen at once that you can't tell what's going on. This was all plain as day when you could see the individual waves graphed on the screen. He spoke into a microphone and had the DSP output his voice with echo (the room had a nice audio system so it was interesting). John used the DSP to generate a couple different tones. At one point he started getting a lot of feedback but it wasn't harsh feedback and it eventually evened out and became one steady tone. He explained how the DSP had just found the perfect pitch of the room and how that can be used to design "the perfect audio system" for that room's acoustics. He then shut it off before the ceiling would start to crumble (Was that live or Memorex?) Price: ------ Native Development Kit is $500 for the software. This does everything on-chip. Results are echoed back to the Amiga. Amiga Development Kit's price is unknown. This lets you compile, etc. on the Amiga and download code to the DSP. It will include a .library for accessing the DSP so that all languages can access it. 1/2 a CRAY accessible from AmigaBASIC! The boards themselves will run from less than $1500 (1 DSP with no external RAM) to $4000-$5000 (2 DSPs with 512K RAM). No prices on "personality modules" or "daughter boards" yet. Implications: ------------- The NeXT has a Motorola DSP 56001; which is inferior to the AT&T model. The AT&T chip is the chip-of-choice for serious research. It's faster and it's floating-point. This means the NeXT has one sophomoric DSP while your Amiga could have 2 superior DSPs. AT&T/Bell-frobs can buy Bonsai boards because AT&T/Bell-frobs must all use the AT&T DSP chips. This means it has a large potential market. This is the big one: John claims "Best price/performance ratio of any FP DSP in the industry" with this board. I believe him. Summary: -------- Wow! This board can make an Amiga 2500/30 more capable than a NeXT for many applications. It is the least expensive price/performance ratio that can be found. The software support is excellent. The design is great too. It was shown at EuroDevCon '90 and it made many people interested. I predict that if this board is marketed correctly it can really make the scientific community take notice of the Amiga. All this comes at a time when C-A is stepping up its college/ university-orientented marketing. -Tom (John Cadona is on the network and might be reading this, hopefully he'll correct any factual errors.) P.S. Also at this JAUG meeting I was supposed to give a review/ presentation about AmigaTeX from Radical Eye Software. Due to the length of John's presentation it was postponed to the next meeting (March 30th). No hard feelings, John! --------------------------------------------------------------------- This article is 100% Copyright 1990 Tom Limoncelli. Re-print and copying permission granted only from me. Permission granted to copy throughout Usenet/Bitnet/Internet/FidoNet. I can be contacted at +1 201 408 5389 or as tlimonce@Drew.edu or tlimonce@Drew.Bitnet or limonce@pilot.njin.net or "Tom Limoncelli / Drew University / PO Box 802 / CM 1060 / Madison, NJ 07940". Sorry for the long disclaimer but the last time I wrote a long article like this (different topic, similar magnitude of importance) I found various "rumors" columns had printed parts of it without permission. -- Tom Limoncelli The computer industry should spend more time in front of tlimonce@drew.uucp their computers. Remember when "Look & Feel" tlimonce@drew.Bitnet was what you tried to do on a date? limonce@pilot.njin.net
allen@grebyn.com (Allen Farrington) (03/05/90)
In article <Mar.3.17.32.13.1990.10349@pilot.njin.net>, limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) writes: > > The product was "The Bonsai 2000 DSP board" for the Amiga 2000 by John > Cadona of Cadona Research & Engineering (CRE... pronounced like CRAY). > After 2 years of research & development, this was the first public > showing. Would John Cadona or someone officially affiliated with the Bonsai 2000 please contact me about detailed information and possibly setting up a demo. Allen H. Farrington (703) 222-9612 wk. Hughes Simulation Systems, Inc. -- |------------------------------------------| | Allen H. Farrington (703) 222-9612 | "It's like nothing we've ever | allen@grebyn.com | dealt with before." |------------------------------------------| -Mr. Spock
tlimonce@drunivac.drew.edu (03/05/90)
[ Repost -- Fixed a couple typos. (I cancelled the first post) ] WARNING: This is really long because I wanted to include a lot of detail. I'm really excited about this product. I have a BIG SCOOP for everyone. At the February JAUG (Jersey Amiga Users Group) meeting we were witness to a new product. I think this will be a real ground-breaking product for the Amiga; as I explain at the end of this article. The product was "The Bonsai 2000 DSP board" for the Amiga 2000 by John Cadona of Cadona Research & Engineering (CRE... pronounced like CRAY). After 2 years of research & development, this was the first public showing. Nutshell Review: ---------------- This board gives you either one or two DSPs in your Amiga 2000 computer (or A2500, or A2500/30, you get the hint). The DSP is the AT&T WE DSP 32C at 50MHz. You can have 0-256K RAM per DSP. (each DSP has 6K local RAM). The hardware interface is really well thought-out. The software interface is especially good. This should make the scientific and audio communities very interested in the Amiga. The price performance made this especially interesting. (see the end of this article) DSPs In General: ---------------- The talk began with an explanation of DSPs in general. A DSP (Digital Signal Processor) is a board that can do the high-speed calculations required to do sound manipulation. They were originally designed for telecommunications (digital phone systems, etc.). Of course, anything that can do such calculations can also be programmed to do calculations for other applications. So, a DSP in an Amiga (instead of a phone system) can be a next generation math-coprocessor. Though, that's really an insult to the chip. A "signal" is a sound-wave traveling down a wire. A computer translates that into a series of numbers to represent what the signal did over a period of time. If you can manipulate those numbers fast enough, you could manipulate the sound as it's happening (real-time manipulation). Amiga sound stores 8-bits for every "number" when it digitizes or plays sound. A CD player uses 16-bits (or 18 ...depending on how you think about it) per number. A CD player plays at 44.1MHz; this means that it records 44.1 million numbers per second! Now you understand why a DSP has to be able to do fast math. If you have an equation that will lower a sound 2 octaves and you want to do it in real-time; you need to do that equation 44.1 million times per second. DSPs store their numbers in different formats. The DSP used in the NeXT machine uses fixed-point numbers. The AT&T chip uses floating point (FP) numbers. This gives this chip an advantage because it can use a wider range of numbers. For example, 0dB is a whisper that can be barely heard by the human ear. 120dB is painful to humans. The floating point format that the AT&T WE 32C can hear BETTER than a human ear. It can hear a larger range and it can hear at a better resolution. How does a DSP do what it does? Here is a simplified description: If you have a 10-second sample you may have thousands of numbers. A DSP can perform the same calculation over each and every number at a blinding rate. This calculation can modify the signal or reach some aggregate statistic, etc. Most all wave theory requires such calculations as do other mathematical work. The AT&T WE 32c DSP Chip: ------------------------- Uses floating point (can "hear" better than a human). 6K of internal RAM right on the chip. External RAM helps performance. 2 internal processes can happen at once. If you want to multiply one sample by 5 and add the previous sample's value the DSP can start the next multiply while the current "add" is being performed. 12.5 MIPS. 25 MFLOPS. 16 Meg of RAM max. 16-bit parallel port. 16 megabaud serial port. Internal/external communication between different parts of the chip. Special FP format (single precision) but can convert to/from IEEE single precision on the fly. Since this chip is the choice of chips for scientists; and since it is *the* DSP chip used by AT&T/Bell-foo/Bell-frob researchers it has a C compiler, assembler, linker. It has application libraries, simulators/debuggers, etc. The application libraries are nice. Need to process an echo (reverb effect)? Just link to the correct application library can call the routine! Applications: ------------- John had a long list of possible applications. I'll try to list them here and explain some of the more interesting ones. Audio processing & manipulation (could be a VoiceMail processor). Sound synthesis (voice or music) -- Roland synth. quality. Spectral estimation & detection. Echo cancellation. Modulation/demodulation -- It can be a high-speed modem or FAX. Encryption. Filtering. MIDI Integration -- Play keyboard & have DSP work on the sound. VERY high-end audio -- More than CD-quality, so use an Amiga with a lot of RAM and a large hard drive as your audio studio. When you are done, submit it to a CD-manufacturer for pressing. Signal generator -- Generate any tone you want. Speech recognition (do the audio processing for your software). Imagine processing. Pattern Recognition. Servo-control/robotics. HAM Radio. Radar processing -- Could sample AM radio right off the antenna! Sonar processing. Personal super computing (more on that later). Mathematics modeling -- a current fad in the scientific industry. Data collection. Research. Education -- Use it's power to draw something that a student is trying to visualize. He gave one example of something that is difficult to understand, but if you see it animated in real-time it all comes clear. The animation requires the horse-power of a DSP. Graphics Applications: ---------------------- -- For use with graphics, the Bonsai2000 could do translation, scaling, rotations, shading, perspective and other data manipulations. These all require a lot of mathematical calculations that the DSP can do. -- Realistic scene generation will be more possible. Ray-tracing, radiosity ("glow"), and mapping & projectional methods are all math-intensive. Imaging wrapping an image around a 3D shape in an instant. -- Scientific Visualization often requires a CRAY. How many people would settle for 1/2 a CRAY all to themselves at this price instead of millions of dollars for a CRAY that they have to share with other researchers? -- ALMOST REAL-TIME RAY-TRACING. Ray-tracing is slow because it requires so much floating point math to be performed. This is what the DSP does well! The Card Itself: ---------------- John offered to pass the card around. After hearing it's price no body wanted to take responsibility of passing it person-to-person. It was pretty funny. I was impressed when I got hold of the card. The hardware is finished; no patches were showing on the board. I remember when the first RAM cards for the Amiga were released and AmigaWorld did a review of a bunch of them. They all had hand-soldered last-minute patches all over them except for the ASDG board, which looked completely professional. This card looked the same way. It looked like it had been in production for a while and was done by a very serious developer (which describes CRE). Configurations are flexible: You can vary the kind of performance you want based on how much you can afford to pay: -- 1 or 2 DSPs running at 50MHz. -- 0, 32, 64, 128, 256K RAM per DSP. -- Using PALs, you can reconfigure the memory map of the DSP. -- The less-expensive "DSP32" can also be used (slower performance). -- 8Kx8 or 32Kx8 SRAM (8- or 32-bit bus) 16-bit parallel interface to Amiga w/DMA access to all RAM memory and control registers. In other words, you can go "straight to the chip". Uses static RAM, 35ns. (as a comparison, 150ns RAM is used in the Amiga 1000). Runs in parallel with the Amiga. High-speed 32-bit bus on the card for communications between the components. You can plug boards into this 32-bit bus to (1) give the first DSP more memory (2) parallel access to other devices (3) add even more DSPs. An example of (2) was to add some kind of medical device to the bus so that the DSP can monitor an experiment or a patient. General I/O support via daughter boards: Personality modules on each DSP. Attach samplers, CDs, etc. Tightly couples sync & control via flexible interrupt system between all Bonsai subsystems and the Amiga. Demos: ------ He showed a sound-wave graph of his voice and his wife's voice (each person had said the same words) and we were able to see some differences that make voice recognition difficult. Another example (not shown, but talked about) was the voice print of "How do you reck a nice beach?" and "How do you recognize speech?" and how similar they are. That's why computer voice-recognition is a long time away. He held a microphone to one end of a slinky and dropped the other end. The graph generated by the Amiga showed how the slinky... ummm... slinked. When you use your ear for this experiment, so many sounds happen at once that you can't tell what's going on. This was all plain as day when you could see the individual waves graphed on the screen. He spoke into a microphone and had the DSP output his voice with echo (the room had a nice audio system so it was interesting). John used the DSP to generate a couple different tones. At one point he started getting a lot of feedback but it wasn't harsh feedback and it eventually evened out and became one steady tone. He explained how the DSP had just found the perfect pitch of the room and how that can be used to design "the perfect audio system" for that room's acoustics. He then shut it off before the ceiling would start to crumble (Was that live or Memorex?) Price: ------ Native Development Kit is $500 for the software. This does everything on-chip. Results are echoed back to the Amiga. Amiga Development Kit's price is unknown. This lets you compile, etc. on the Amiga and download code to the DSP. It will include a .library for accessing the DSP so that all languages can access it. 1/2 a CRAY accessible from AmigaBASIC! The boards themselves will run from less than $1500 (1 DSP with no external RAM) to $4000-$5000 (2 DSPs with 512K RAM). No prices on "personality modules" or "daughter boards" yet. Implications: ------------- The NeXT has a Motorola DSP 56001; which is inferior to the AT&T model. The AT&T chip is the chip-of-choice for serious research. It's faster and it's floating-point. This means the NeXT has one sophomoric DSP while your Amiga could have 2 superior DSPs. AT&T/Bell-frobs can buy Bonsai boards because AT&T/Bell-frobs must all use the AT&T DSP chips. This means it has a large potential market. This is the big one: John claims "Best price/performance ratio of any FP DSP in the industry" with this board. I believe him. Summary: -------- Wow! This board can make an Amiga 2500/30 more capable than a NeXT for many applications. It is the least expensive price/performance ratio that can be found. The software support is excellent. The design is great too. It was shown at EuroDevCon '90 and it made many people interested. I predict that if this board is marketed correctly it can really make the scientific community take notice of the Amiga. All this comes at a time when C-A is stepping up its college/ university-orientented marketing. -Tom (John Cadona is on the network and might be reading this, hopefully he'll correct any factual errors.) P.S. Also at this JAUG meeting I was supposed to give a review/ presentation about AmigaTeX from Radical Eye Software. Due to the length of John's presentation it was postponed to the next meeting (March 30th). No hard feelings, John! --------------------------------------------------------------------- This article is 100% Copyright 1990 Tom Limoncelli. Re-print and copying permission granted only from me. Permission granted to copy throughout Usenet/Bitnet/Internet/FidoNet. I can be contacted at +1 201 408 5389 or as tlimonce@Drew.edu or tlimonce@Drew.Bitnet or limonce@pilot.njin.net or "Tom Limoncelli / Drew University / PO Box 802 / CM 1060 / Madison, NJ 07940". Sorry for the long disclaimer but the last time I wrote a long article like this (different topic, similar magnitude of importance) I found various "rumors" columns had printed parts of it without permission. -- Tom Limoncelli The computer industry should spend more time in front of tlimonce@drew.uucp their computers. Remember when "Look & Feel" tlimonce@drew.Bitnet was what you tried to do on a date? limonce@pilot.njin.net -Me
tlimonce@drunivac.drew.edu (03/05/90)
In article <41152.25f147bf@drunivac.drew.edu>, tlimonce@drunivac.drew.edu writes: > Amiga sound stores 8-bits for every "number" when it digitizes or plays > sound. A CD player uses 16-bits (or 18 ...depending on how you think > about it) per number. A CD player plays at 44.1MHz; this means that it ^^^--should be KHz > records 44.1 million numbers per second! Now you understand why a DSP ^^^^^^^--should be thousand > has to be able to do fast math. If you have an equation that will > lower a sound 2 octaves and you want to do it in real-time; you need to > do that equation 44.1 million times per second. ^^^^^^^--should be thousand About 5 people have mailed to me about this. Yes, a CD samples at 44.1KHz (KILO, not MEGA). It even says so right here on my notes about the meeting. It must be that the "K" and "M" keys are so close together. :-) Computationally this makes sense. 44.1 million samples per second is more than most computers could handle. If a CD player could keep up with 44.1MHz you wouldn't see many sold for $200! -Tom --- Tom Limoncelli tlimonce@drew.edu (new) ...as seen in USA Today! tlimonce@drew.Bitnet limonce@pilot.njin.net
dandb@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Dean Rubine) (03/06/90)
In article <Mar.3.17.32.13.1990.10349@pilot.njin.net> limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) writes: >about it) per number. A CD player plays at 44.1MHz; this means that it >records 44.1 million numbers per second! Now you understand why a DSP >has to be able to do fast math. If you have an equation that will >lower a sound 2 octaves and you want to do it in real-time; you need to >do that equation 44.1 million times per second. You mean 44.1 KHz, of course. Surely a 25 MFlop processor isn't going to do any interesting calculations in one forty-millionth of a second - can't even get one whole flop done in that time. Also, since a CD player is stereo you'd actually get 88,200 16 bit numbers per second. Oh, and CD players don't record. >This article is 100% Copyright 1990 Tom Limoncelli. Re-print and >copying permission granted only from me. Don't let anybody reprint the above paragraph because, well, you'll look silly. -- ARPA: Dean.Rubine@CS.CMU.EDU PHONE: 412-268-2613 [ Free if you call from work ] US MAIL: Computer Science Dept / Carnegie Mellon U / Pittsburgh PA 15213 DISCLAIMER: My employer wishes I would stop posting and do some work.
marco@hprnd.HP.COM (Marco Gonzalez) (03/06/90)
limonce@pilot.njin.net (Tom Limoncelli) writes: NOTE: This is not intented to be a flame whatsoever. >WARNING: This is really long because I wanted to include a lot of >detail. I'm really excited about this product. [stuff deleted] >Amiga sound stores 8-bits for every "number" when it digitizes or plays >sound. A CD player uses 16-bits (or 18 ...depending on how you think A CD samples at 12bits resolution, not 16 or 18. >about it) per number. A CD player plays at 44.1MHz; this means that it Wrong, when the CD is recorder, data is sampled at 44.1KHz (Kilo Hertz, NOT MEGA Hz). This number is more than twice the maximum frequency a human can hear (suposed to be 20KHz), so that the original signal can be reproduced without information lost even for the "highest" frequency. >records 44.1 million numbers per second! Now you understand why a DSP 44.1 thousand numbers per second!. see above. >has to be able to do fast math. If you have an equation that will >lower a sound 2 octaves and you want to do it in real-time; you need to >do that equation 44.1 million times per second. see above. [stuff deleted] The AT&T WE 32c DSP Chip: ------------------------- > Uses floating point (can "hear" better than a human). I think you are miss-using the term "hear". The actual "hearing" is performed by some external device, usually a microphone. (i.e. a chip CAN NOT "hear"!). [stuff deleted] > -- ALMOST REAL-TIME RAY-TRACING. Ray-tracing is slow because it >requires so much floating point math to be performed. This is what the >DSP does well! yes it does, but depends on what do YOU call ALMOST REAL-TIME. near real-time ray-tracing is far away from reality on most machines, even on the high-end. And even with this chip, the 68000 would not make almost real-time ray-tracing possible. [stuff deleted] >copying permission granted only from me. Permission granted to copy >throughout Usenet/Bitnet/Internet/FidoNet. I can be contacted at >+1 201 408 5389 or as tlimonce@Drew.edu or tlimonce@Drew.Bitnet or >limonce@pilot.njin.net or "Tom Limoncelli / Drew University / PO Box >802 / CM 1060 / Madison, NJ 07940". >-- >Tom Limoncelli The computer industry should spend more time in front of >tlimonce@drew.uucp their computers. Remember when "Look & Feel" >tlimonce@drew.Bitnet was what you tried to do on a date? >limonce@pilot.njin.net ---------- Marco. Disclaimer: My opinions in no way reflect those of my employer.