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Rasterops PhotoPro NuBus card

slomacuser

Well-known member
There is absolutely no info about this card anywhere on the net. Looks like it is a JPEG Compress/Decompress card and probably speeds Photoshop plug-ins like Thunder Storm Photoshop Booster. There is a processor LR33000MC - 33 MHz chip on. Is this some kinda DSP processor?

Would this card speed a QuickTime video compression when grabbing a video? Any info would be great.

photopro.jpg

chips.jpg

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Is this some kinda DSP processor?


I think this is an embedded MIPS chip.  So a reasonably conventional processor rather than a DSP, presumably being used as a copro here.  Which would make sense for still image work.  I wonder if one could upload arbitrary code to it :) .

 

slomacuser

Well-known member
With the advent of technology, digital signal processing applications are flourishing prominently in space, medical and many commercial related areas. RISC processor is the heart of many high speed applications of embedded and digital signal processing. Floating point representation has prevalent ascendancy over fixed point numbers as it endeavours dynamic range of values. Hence in this paper a high speed MIPS based 32 bit RISC processor with single precision floating point unit for DSP applications is proposed. The inclination of the entire design is towards improving the performance of floating point arithmetic unit so as the performance of the entire RISC processor is ameliorated. The proposed processor is proficient of executing arithmetic, logical, floating point, data transfer, memory, shifting and rotating instructions. The complex multiplication are frequently used in the DSP applications and thus a special instruction for complex multiplication is incorporated. The multiplication engross most of the time, power and area of any operation, on that account the multiplier are reduced in number from four to two as compared to conventional complex multiplication method.
 If I understand correct the above quote, MIPS is RISC with FPU for DSP applications  :) ? ...

 

slomacuser

Well-known member
RasterOps is following a similar strategy, with a 40-megahertz LSI 3000 RISC processor on a daughtercard to match its video cards. Although the chip is completely programmable, RasterOps envisions that it will first be used for JPEG (Joint PhotographicExperts Group) compression and decompression. It is fast enough to capture QuickTime movies with near-real-time frame rates -- 15 frames per second and higher at full-screen resolution.

 

cheesestraws

Well-known member
Well, MIPS is a general-purpose RISC instruction set, similar to the way ARM works.  There are then multiple different kinds of processor for different applications made by different companies, but which implement the same instruction set. 

That particular one doesn't seem to have an FPU on-chip (the datasheet is here: https://www.alldatasheet.com/view.jsp?Searchword=LR33000MC) but does have a DRAM controller, and seems to be designed to get integers into and out of memory as fast as possible (note the emphasis in the summary at the top of the datasheet).  What's more, it doesn't support any offboard coprocessors either.  So I would think it's a more generic embedded CPU than one designed specifically for DSP. 

 

Johnnya101

Well-known member
Just snagged one of these cards off ebay. @slomacuser, do you happen to have copies of the drivers you could upload?

Also found some info in an old magazine online:
photopro.PNG

So it looks to be a JPEG type of accelerator for Photoshop.
 

slomacuser

Well-known member
I have uploaded the drivers to macintosh garden

 
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