Convergence was a clear theme among the most sophisticated products introduced at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. One of the more intriguing examples was the Lyra Audio/Video Jukebox from RCA. This handheld device has a list of audio and video capabilities long enough to make a Swiss army knife jealous. Its list of hardware components is equally impressive: an internal hard drive, color LCD, and a bevy of connectivity options are only the beginning.
This long list of components begs the question: how important is the processor when it has so many expensive and power-hungry neighbors? If, for example, a huge internal hard drive dominates system costs, why bother finessing the perfect balance of processor price and performance? Just pick a processor that gets the job done and move on.
Before making this leap, however, system designers should consider the nature of the software development effort they face. For mature markets, many consumer products are built around highly integrated, off-the-shelf solutions that include both the processor and required media-processing software. In this scenario, most of the custom-developed software—a user interface, for example—is not computationally intensive and is likely to be written in C or C++. For this type of software, the architectural details of the processor make little difference.
On the other hand, cutting-edge consumer electronics products by their nature cannot rely on pre-packaged, off-the-shelf solutions. Often, media-processing software needed for the cutting-edge features must be created by the system developer. In such cases, the choice of processor matters greatly. Although compilers have come a long way, it’s still virtually impossible to wring competitive media-processing performance out of a processor without an intimate knowledge of processor’s architectural details. Thus, the ease of developing media-processing software depends greatly on the processor architecture.
Over the last few years, embedded processors of all types have been promoted for media-processing applications. But make no mistake: shoehorning advanced media-processing software onto a poorly suited architecture is like pounding a square peg into a round hole. It can be done, but it requires a big hammer... and the results aren’t pretty.
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