Re: coprocessor

On Thursday 14 February 2008 06:16 am, [email protected] wrote:
> Could it possibly make sense?  Yes, but that would depend on the
> details of the coprocessor.  Do you have any specific parameters for
> the coprocessor in mind?

In March of 2005, Andrey Filippov reported that he had used a 
Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA with theora to design a network camera 
that could compress the image from a 1280x1024 sensor at 30 fps. 
http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT3888835064.html

According to the Xilinx web site, the Spartan-3E (XC3S1200E) 
with 1.2M system gates can be purchased for under US$9.00 
in quantites of 500K.  
http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon_solutions/fpgas/spartan_series/spartan3e_fpgas/index.htm

Those price/performance parameters were what I had in mind.  It 
just seems like doing the compression right behind the sensor 
is the way to go.  With a 640x480 sensor, maybe that kind of FPGA 
could also handle the audio compression?
Regards,
John Kintree