Hi guys,
As we already know that we will have 3Gb/s of bus bandwidth for newer platform, there are abundant bandwidth to spare for other purposes. My question is can hardware codec make use of this bandwidth to perform audio or video conversion between PCI Express and memory?
There are a few scenarios. First, the CPU can start a DMA transfer of MP3 data to Audio Card and decode it in realtime. Second, a general purpose card with a GP processor that can do specialized stuff. And finally, the GP card receive data and sent it to other cards like Video and Sound Card.
The first scenario is there are audio/video cards that accepts MPEG, AC3, ADPCM and maybe others format for output. But for fast decoding MP3 codec, it is overkill. I would say this depends on the acceptance of the standard because there are lots of codecs and new codecs comes out every now. But DVD/VCD(MPG) are standardized so logically, it uses hardware codecs. On the other hand, soft-modems has a software codec because it is cheaper and uses little processor slices.
The second scenario is that a scaled-down specialized processor on a PCI card is used for multimedia purposes only. While this is sort of premium stuff, this may offload multimedia tasks to these cards. The result may be faster and is suitable for professionals(editing and stuffs). I find it mind boggling that current processors with billions cycles per second can't convert 10 minute of sound under 1 minute. The point here is to offload specialized operations to specialized processors. I created a test that decodes from WMA and encode to MPG, 2Gb total of 44/16/2 audio, took 84 minutes to finish the conversion on my XP2000.
The third scenario is about sending encoded data to one card and the card does a bus transfer (i2C?) to other cards. An example would be a TV tuner card doing overlay on a video card. The point here is sending DivX data to a GP Multimedia card and you get the video00000.
What are your views on this, supposing PCI Express are widely available. Does your 300 Meg Zip file worth the waiting time?
(I would like to see WindowOnChip and LinuxOnChip in far future.)
As we already know that we will have 3Gb/s of bus bandwidth for newer platform, there are abundant bandwidth to spare for other purposes. My question is can hardware codec make use of this bandwidth to perform audio or video conversion between PCI Express and memory?
There are a few scenarios. First, the CPU can start a DMA transfer of MP3 data to Audio Card and decode it in realtime. Second, a general purpose card with a GP processor that can do specialized stuff. And finally, the GP card receive data and sent it to other cards like Video and Sound Card.
The first scenario is there are audio/video cards that accepts MPEG, AC3, ADPCM and maybe others format for output. But for fast decoding MP3 codec, it is overkill. I would say this depends on the acceptance of the standard because there are lots of codecs and new codecs comes out every now. But DVD/VCD(MPG) are standardized so logically, it uses hardware codecs. On the other hand, soft-modems has a software codec because it is cheaper and uses little processor slices.
The second scenario is that a scaled-down specialized processor on a PCI card is used for multimedia purposes only. While this is sort of premium stuff, this may offload multimedia tasks to these cards. The result may be faster and is suitable for professionals(editing and stuffs). I find it mind boggling that current processors with billions cycles per second can't convert 10 minute of sound under 1 minute. The point here is to offload specialized operations to specialized processors. I created a test that decodes from WMA and encode to MPG, 2Gb total of 44/16/2 audio, took 84 minutes to finish the conversion on my XP2000.
The third scenario is about sending encoded data to one card and the card does a bus transfer (i2C?) to other cards. An example would be a TV tuner card doing overlay on a video card. The point here is sending DivX data to a GP Multimedia card and you get the video00000.
What are your views on this, supposing PCI Express are widely available. Does your 300 Meg Zip file worth the waiting time?
(I would like to see WindowOnChip and LinuxOnChip in far future.)
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