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20MHz is not a lot, but a DSP is quite different from a regular CPU, so I wonder if it's powerful enough for decoding low-bitrate MP3...


A big maybe. While 20MHz TMS32010 DSP in 1985 was around 386DX 33MHz horsepower wise, if you ignore things like single cycle 16x16 multiply(10-20 faster than 386), it might still be too slow. For comparison ~3x faster DSP56001 in Atari Falcon needs 16MHz CPU assist to decode MP3.


Comparing to a general purpose CPU, I remember from the olden days that a 486 DX4/100 was just BARELY able to decode stereo MP3's if you used a well optimized MS-DOS playback program. In a multitasking environment like Windows -- forget about it!


Windows back then wan’t multitasking. OS/2 on the other hand; I could download at 9600 baud and play Wolfenstein at the same time.


I ran Windows 95 on my 486.


DSP56001 powered Atari Falcon can also "run" Quake 2 :)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNs6Jw4V4vlvafSs0H3Ww...


ummm... and a TMS32030 ? I have one old 16 bit ISA card that was some kind of videotoaster with it.


33Mflops, plenty fast, probably used for hardware encoding CIF/QCIF MPEG1/MJPEG in real time. Now you just need someone to write you that decoder :)


TMS32020 with 1MiB form a Coreco Oculus f64 board




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