Re: Disallowing Pre-Defined Operations

["Marin D. Condic" <mcondic-nospam@quadruscorp.com>]

Niklas Holsti wrote:
> 
> The Analog Devices ADSP-21020 digital signal processor can be put in
> a "saturation" mode in which the arithmetic operations are saturating
> rather than overflowing. I suppose this holds for the newer "SHARC"
> series too.
> 
Cool. I'll put it on my list of things to check out.

> Since the 21020 is a 32-bit, floating-point DSP, this could be a nice
> platform for saturation arithmetic in demanding real-time systems.
> 
There are lots of uses for saturation. One problem though is that you
might need to support user-defined ranges where, AFAIK, there isn't
going to be hardware support. (Maybe someone could come up with some
special range registers on a processor?) For instance, if you have a 10
bit D/A converter, any math you do to drive this you want to saturate
within those 10 bits. 16 bit integer math that saturates isn't likely to
help you much there. So in the end, you still need some compiler
checking capabilities.

Unless you know of some hardware tricks being invented recently?

Thanks for the tip on the DSP.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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