* "PrinceGaz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Sun, 05 Mar 2000
| Are you quite certain of that, my rodent friend? I'm very much into
| emulation of other hardware on my PC (everything from fairly recent
| arcade hardware, back to Space Invaders, various home computers, and the
| Psion organiser range) and I reckon a decent PC could encode ATRAC 4 or
| 4.5 in real-time with no great difficulty.
A Pentium II at 400MHz can manage to convert to MPEG-I Layer III at 128Kbps
in real time. It cannot handle significantly higher bitrates in real time.
This is the machine I have at work, and that is my experience with it. And
as everyone knows, 128Kbps MP3 sucks compared to ATRAC 4.
[...]
| If youre suggesting that is less processor intensive than what that
| little chip in your R55 or whatever does then I seriously doubt your
| sanity :-)
That is exactly what I am saying. Dedicated ASICs blow away the general
purpose processor you find in desktop machines. They excel at their one
task. A "decent PC" simply cannot compare with an ATRAC ASIC. It cannot
perform the staggering quantity of accoustic FFTs required to encode in
real time. The current generation of almost-GHz systems possibly could,
but those almost qualify as low-end supercomputers.
It takes an 80486 running at 33MHz to emulate a 1MHz Apple ][ accurately
(or a fast '386 if the emulator is written entirely in hand-optimized
assembly rather than C). It takes a Pentium running at about 130MHz to
emulate a Genesis console accurately. It takes a Pentium running at 200MHz
or so to emulate the 33MHz PlayStation accurately. Emulation requires
*vastly* more power than the actual hardware itself.
--
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