RE: MD: Sony's new Internet Audio Recording Interface

[Simon Barnes]

Ralph Smeets wrote:

    
    > I thinks the PC has a performance problem due to the 
    > 'enormous' overhead of the
    > OS and the fact that most encoders are programmed in C. 

Most of the overhead of an OS is associated with input/output through
multiple layers of device drivers/protocol stacks. If you have a
computationally intensive algorithm, i/o is relatively unimportant and I
would estimate the OS overhead as less than 1%. I've been using this NT
machine for 3.5 hours now, and the task manager shows the system idle task
has run for 3h33m CPU time. The total for ALL the other processes is about 3
minutes.

Code written in C can easily be tens of times slower than hand written
assembler, but is far more portable, and much easier to write.

    > if the ATRAC DSP has an OS, it will probably be very very very small!

For a dedicated processor, there is usually no need for an OS.

simon
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