3 ms·
I guess for a few years there might have been a market for hardware MP3 decoders. I faintly remember back when playing MP3s did take a sizeable chunk of CPU tim
by Sharlin 4y ago
I guess for a few years there might have been a market for hardware MP3 decoders. I faintly remember back when playing MP3s did take a sizeable chunk of CPU time. But after a Moore cycle or two the cost was negligible, and today Spotify probably spends much more CPU on drawing its interface than decoding the audio stream…
- nsxwolf 4y agoAnd anything I can think of that I'd want a sound card to do these days is being handled by GPUs - like that NVidia AI noise cancellation, where your kids can scream 5 feet away and no one can hear them on Zoom.
- toast0 4y agoNot really on PCs, IMHO. With well optimized software, you could decode in realtime on an i486@100Mhz, a pentium 75 could use winamp and mIRC simultaneously, IIRC. If you didn't have enough CPU to decode mp3, it probably made more sense to upgrade that rather than a mp3 decoder card (if they existed). Mpeg-1/2 (video) decoder cards were more necessary.
- dougmwne 4y agoThanks for the flashback. I too remember when playing an MP3 took a good chunk of processor utilization, maybe 40%, and doing too many other things at the same time would cause it to stutter. I also remember when 1080p and 4k were taxing respectively.