[Fpga-synth] Try out spartan3e projects, questions

[Eric Brombaugh]

malik martin wrote:

> I hope i'm not OT'ing your thread, but do you think spartan 3es are 
> capable of dsp functionality?
> and what makes the dedicated DSPs different?
> I want to get into DSPs as well. I didn't know that AD made the SHARCs.

Definitely not OT.

Yes you can do DSP with Spartan 3E parts. They're fairly good at it too 
- witness the DSP that Scott G. has done in his various synths.

What's the difference between a DSP and an FPGA? That's a FAQ that you 
should be able to google. Put simply though, a DSP is a specialized 
computer that can handle multiplies & adds very quickly and usually has 
extra addressing modes to make certain operations like convolution go 
fast. An FPGA is a bag of random gates, memory & (these days) 
multipliers that you can hook up virtually any way you want. They 
overlap in some ways, but FPGAs are better for really high-speed 
processing, while DSPs allow for more complex but slower algorithms. 
It's a very grey area though...

Eric