From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: * X-Spam-Status: No, score=1.6 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_05,INVALID_MSGID, REPLYTO_WITHOUT_TO_CC autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,e35f2efd6c0447ec,start X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: munck@mindspring.com (Robert Munck) Subject: Re: Death of DSP support? Date: 1997/08/27 Message-ID: <34043001.70296261@news.mindspring.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 268608131 References: <3402E91D.6D1A@top.monad.net> X-Server-Date: 27 Aug 1997 14:13:21 GMT Organization: Mill Creek Systems LC Reply-To: munck@acm.org Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1997-08-27T14:13:21+00:00 List-Id: On Tue, 26 Aug 1997 07:33:01 -0700, Steven O'Neill wrote: >...It appears that, in buying Tartan, TI has seriously curtailed any >possibility of Ada use in the DSP domain. I know very little about general DSP programming, but did a lot of work for NRL in underwater audio (i.e. Sonar) signal processing. We showed pretty conclusively that the "natural" programming language for that restricted domain is data flow diagrams. All of the work done in textual languages that we saw was a disaster. This seemed to be true because the great majority of computation done in a DSP was performed in highly- specialized SIMD array processors. These were very tightly microcoded (horizontal microcode) to do a small number of SP primitives -- Walsh filters, FFT, bandwidth, etc. The control programs, written in Ada and running in 68K micros, did little more than schedule the movement of data between the SIMD machines and large buffer memories. Rather than hardcode this logic, we developed a system to interpret encoded DFWs. Coding was done on a MAC using a CAD/flowcharting tool. AT&T implemented this basic architecture in a wonderful processor called the ECOS EMSP. However, IBM went completely bananas attacking it (at the Congressional lobbyist level) after we reproduced in 6 coder-months a system for the AN/UYS-1 that they had spent 200 coder-years developing. I don't know if this approach would work as well in the general case of DSP. Bob Munck Mill Creek Systems LC