[maemo-developers] DSP vs CPU for multimedia, Re: [maemo-developers] Audio enabled dev-platform?

[From: Frantisek Dufka]

BTW, did you think about using main CPU for decoding multimedia too? I 
was a bit shocked when playing the Ice Age trailer and saw in load 
plugin that main CPU is completely idle and both video and audio is 
decoded by DSP. I have no benchmarks or practical experience so far but 
from the documentation about C55x and ARM926TEJ it looks like the main 
cpu with edsp instructions could do similar work in similar speed as DSP 
does. If multimedia jobs could be distributed across both cpus (like dsp 
doing audio and color conversion into framebuffer, mpu decoding video) 
we could see higher resolution or frame rates.

Is the gstreamer framework able to support more implementations for same 
codec (DSP vs CPU) and chose one based on priority? Will the stuff you 
are talking about releasing in future be enough for hacking in this area?

Frantisek

Devesh Kothari wrote:

> improving multimedia support is one of priority area. I hope we are able
> to push that out. Just to let you know we are working on it :) AFAIK it
> is mostly issues related to redistribution of the DSP side stuff (even
> in binary) which would enable the layer below DSPGateway.
> 
> Devesh
>