For those who haven't heard, Creative has decided to open-source
the Linux drivers for its SB-Live card. This is interesting news
for the SAOL developer, because the SB-Live has a programmable
DSP on it. I don't know the exact specs, but I do know that although
it's not completely general-purpose (it doesn't have branching
instructions, for example), the Emu 10K1 chip has a variety of
features that would be useful to accelerate SAOL implementations.
So two things:
1. Can any of the Creative/Emu people lurking on this list tell
us whether the 10K1 spec is likely to be included as part of
the open-source package? Will there be enough information
that the non-registered developer will be able to program the
10K1 and send code to the chip?
2. I'd like to see some discussion and comments from people who
know more about DSP compilers about the prospects of making an
SB-Live accelerated version of sfront and/or SAINT, when
Giorgio releases it. How hard are the
practical issues involved in making an implementation where
part of the code runs on the host and part runs on the sound
card? Are there good theoretical models for doing the
compiler optimizations for programmable but not general-purpose
architectures?
Best to all,
-- Eric
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 10 2000 - 12:15:42 EDT