Cory reports in IRC that a single SETI unit took a month on a Pentium 150. So, basically, get a grip.

Click to expand...

I have one of the Radius cards with four DSPs and according to the benchmarks (advertising, really) it came with I did some basic math. While the card will certainly speed up computation considerably on certain tasks it would still be slow by todays standards. As a matter of fact, if you took a Mac with 4 NuBus slots and filled every slot with a 4 DSP card (16 DSPs!) you would still be lagging slightly behind the performance you would get out of a G3 upgrade for that Mac. A midrange G4 nowadays is barely able to run YouTube in a web browser but even it would blow past a Mac with 16 DSPs without much effort.

Having said that, are there cool things we could think of to do with the DSPs? Yes!

Like you said, debatable practicalities notwithstanding, it's an avenue for some useful experimentation on a first trial basis. :approve:

Click to expand...

Experimentation is good. Getting these cards/chips to run routines, even trivial at first, would be great to see.

I have worked as a commercial programmer, including working on Mac applications and I might be willing to get behind such an effort *if* I have the time. One possible idea is an MP3 player app that offloads CPU workload so that you can play music in the background while you work at near full speed on the machine.

Anything having to do with sound or graphics on proprietary cards using proprietary software can't be nearly straightforward, or so I'm led to believe.

Click to expand...

That is true ... it isn't/won't be ...