From: Tim Teulings <tim_at_edge.ping.de>
Date: 1 Sep 2003 19:28:43 +0200

Hallo!

> >But similar to MP3, OGG of course requires a
> >certain degree of CPU performance and since we don't have enough OGG
> >support
> >provided by hardware, an Archos unit won't be able to play it.
>
> The reason "we don't have enough OGG support provided by hardware" is
> because we do not have the MAS SDK and therefore cannot use 50% of the
> hardware - LOL

What he means is, that the MAS is a special chip that has special hard coded
routines for doing special thing doing especially fast (like good old AMIGA
chipset, AltiVec, MMX and all the others):-) It does this by specialisation.
It is extremly fast (in comparsion to a not optimized naive decoder in my
Athlon 1,8), because it is extremly specialized for doing special things for mp3.

If you have the docs it might (and some say this is very likely) turn out that
OGG is different and that it needs other special features and functions. Having
coded a mpg decode, I now that most optimizations are designed for mp3 and are
not very general. If the chip could do everything very fast, we would not need
a processer, we would do everything using this processor - this we do not, so
there must be some limitation!? It is like trying to play Quake II only a computer
without a hardware accelerated grafic card. You can play however original AMIGA
games, by using raw power ;-)

-- 
Gruß...
       Tim.

Received on 2003-09-01