4 ms·
Everyone here is going on about cpu efficiency. When the joke is, that a 10 year old MP3 player can play music all day on a batery the size of a nickle because
by timthelion 9y ago
Everyone here is going on about cpu efficiency. When the joke is, that a 10 year old MP3 player can play music all day on a batery the size of a nickle because it's not decoding using a CPU but using a decoder built into an ARM package. The CPU is actually off most of the time when your mp3 player is playing.
- clarry 9y agoThe earliest MP3 players required hardware decoders, but it didn't take long for these devices to get faster CPUs that could do the decoding. This in turn enabled firmware updates (either official or unofficial, e.g. rockbox) to bring in support for new audio formats.
- naikrovek 9y agoAn updateable firmware does not necessitate a software decoder. Hardware decoders can (and do) have their own firmware, and can support additional formats if they were designed with that in mind. Also you can have a hardware decoded MP3 path, and a software decoded OGG path, for example. They can coexist. Most real hardware wasn't designed to be on the market long enough for any of this to come to pass, though, and you're probably 100% correct.
- birksherty 9y agoWhat? So many mp3 players uses lot more cpu than something like foobar, doesn't matter if that cpu is not used for decoding or not. So, some people uses an lighter player that does the same thing.