Original and current iPod series too slow for OGG support
Posted by: Newsfactory on: 06/06/2004 12:11 PM [ Print | 2 comment(s) ] · 1616 views
CDFreaks reports that Rio Audio Engineer Hugo Fiennes checked out the iPod series on whether it could support the open source OGG Vorbis codec. The current and first two generations of the iPod all use the PP5002D CPU. This CPU has a very limited 96k of SRAM which is just big enough to hold either the MP3 or AAC code while playing.
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spankmaster Unregistered |
#54280 Posted on: 06/06/2004 03:38 PM
that's ok. iPods suck anyway. :-) |
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FaaR Unregistered |
#54281 Posted on: 06/06/2004 04:48 PM
Whenever an engineer does an "analysis" on a competitor's hardware and comes up with so-and-so does not support X (which, incidentally, THIS gadget which my employer makes does), one should immediately get very suspicious. The guy mentions the iPod's CPU has 96kB SRAM in it. Now, this is actually quite a lot of memory if used correctly. Back in the day, a then rather famous Amiga coder implemented an LHA extractor that ran most of the main decoding loop out of the instruction cache of a 68020 processor. The 68020 has 256 BYTES of icache! Naturally, the Ogg compressor is much more complex than the LHA format, but to say 96k is not enough is most likely entirely overstating things. I can imagine it is not enough if one takes the open-source C++ code and compiles it straight for the CPU in question, but that is not efficient use of memory. If written natively for the iPod's hardware, one can be pretty certain it will be enough. |
