[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] gstreamer launcher (proper video sink?)

[From: David D. Hagood]

Frantisek Dufka wrote:

> better resolution and better utilization of both main CPU and DSP. Or is 
> there some catch why doing it on DSP makes better sense? AFAIK the main 
> ARM CPU should be better suited for the task than the DSP.
> 

While I've not started working in depth on the OMAP1710, I do have 
experience with signal processing and embedded programming - so take 
this for what it's worth.

The ARM does not have floating point, only integer math, so any 
processing of the video has to be done in integer, and there are a great 
deal of the operations that really don't fit well.

The DSP may not have floating point, but it has fixed point, which is a 
hybrid of integer and floating point where 1.0000 is represented by 
0x7FFFFFFF and -1 is 0x80000000. The DSP automatically handles shifting 
multiplies, so that 0x7FFFFFFF * 0x7FFFFFFF = 0x7FFFFFFF (1.0 * 1.0 = 
1.0), so you can do many sorts of non-integer math very quickly. Also, 
many of the operations in video codecs are multiply-and-accumulate 
operations ( a += b*c ), which DSPs have a single instruction to do.

In short, clock per clock, I suspect the DSP can do more video work than 
the ARM can.

Now, you *could* make the argument that if the workload of decoding 
video could somehow be split between the 2 processor cores there might 
be some benefit - maybe leave the video scaling to the ARM but let the 
video coding be done by the DSP core. However, the real limiting factor 
may not even be MIPS, but rather bandwidth - the speed at which the ARM 
can pull the data out of flash (esp. MMC - that's not exactly the 
speediest interface in the world), and the speed at which data can be 
moved into the video buffer.

Remember what step 0 of optimization is: MEASURE IT FIRST!

Until somebody can actually measure where all the time is going, making 
pronouncements like "It's slow because of X - I just know it" are the 
root of all evil - you spend a great deal of time tweaking that one 
thing only to find out that it was only 1% of the time to begin with.