[alsa-devel] [PATCH] [RFC 0/13] Intel SST drivers

[Harsha, Priya]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: alsa-devel-bounces at alsa-project.org [mailto:alsa-devel-bounces at alsa-
>project.org] On Behalf Of Mark Brown
>Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 4:02 PM
>To: Koul, Vinod
>Cc: alsa-devel at alsa-project.org
>Subject: Re: [alsa-devel] [PATCH] [RFC 0/13] Intel SST drivers
>
>On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 11:36:03AM +0530, Koul, Vinod wrote:
>
>> There are 2 drivers involved. One is for the audio DSP engine that can
>> decode and do audio processing and one is for the ALSA sound card
>> driver with support for three different sound cards that are supported
>> on the platform.
>
>Looking at this I'm wondering how general purpose the DSP on these parts
>is.  This sort of integrated DSP is fairly common in modern embedded
>CPUs but normally the DSP is exposed in a more general fashion, allowing
>the DSP to be used for non-audio purposes as well which means that the
>DSP management code tends to live outside the sound tree.
>
>Given what you're saying about Intel-provided firmwares it is possible
>that while the hardware is capable of general purpose use you're not
>exposing sufficient information for people to actually write their own
>firmware in which case that's less of an issue and the situation is
>closer to that with things like WiFi cards but I thought it was better t
>ask.

The DSP is Low power audio engine and not a general purpose DSP. The DSP is optimized for Audio decode/encode offload and rendering. Yes we are thinking of situation closer to WiFi cards

Thanks,
Harsha