rpA-Inc@cup.portal.com (RP and Ainc) (01/25/91)
Saw this at MacWorld SF a couple of weeks ago: Storm Technology (Palo Alto, CA) had a hardware accelerator card with 2 fast DSP's (sorry I can't recall the models) on board. They claimed something like 60 MIPS out of the board. They had a modified JPEG program they called JPEG++ that used the accelerator board and did incredibly fast compress and decompress on JPEG pictures (the PhotoShop decompression plug-in opened a JPEG compressed file as fast as a regular uncompressed file. At least that's how it appeared to the eye...) From the demo and the discussion I had with them, JPEG++ essentially lets you select a region within the bigger picture and pick the Q-factor for that area. The rationale was that areas in a picture that had text should be set to low or no compression to allow the text to remain legible. Their other claim over C-Cubed was that all their stuff was in software so it could keep up with changes in JPEG. Price for SW+HW was $995 (list). It should drop once JPEG becomes common. A little too stiff for now... My main question to them was whether a development environment for access to that board would also be available. I've got some code that could use a 60 MIPS coprocessor (:-) Thought people might be interested. I thought it was an interesting approach to the performance problem... Ramin Firoozye' rp&A Inc. San Francisco, CA. [ Disclaimer: I have no affiliation or interest in the company or the product. Product specs are based on my non-fault-tolerant memory... ]