Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!portal!cup.portal.com!rpA-Inc
From: rpA-Inc@cup.portal.com (RP and Ainc)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: JPEG++ and HW Accelerators
Message-ID: <38434@cup.portal.com>
Date: 25 Jan 91 00:03:58 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 31


Saw this at MacWorld SF a couple of weeks ago:

Storm Technology (Palo Alto, CA) had a hardware accelerator card with 
2 fast DSP's (sorry I can't recall the models) on board. They claimed
something like 60 MIPS out of the board. They had a modified JPEG program
they called JPEG++ that used the accelerator board and did incredibly
fast compress and decompress on JPEG pictures (the PhotoShop decompression
plug-in opened a JPEG compressed file as fast as a regular uncompressed file.
At least that's how it appeared to the eye...)
From the demo and the discussion I had with them, JPEG++ essentially lets 
you select a region within the bigger picture and pick the Q-factor for 
that area. The rationale was that areas in a picture that had text 
should be set to low or no compression to allow the text to remain legible. 
Their other claim over C-Cubed was that all their stuff was in software 
so it could keep up with changes in JPEG. Price for SW+HW was $995 (list). 
It should drop once JPEG becomes common. A little too stiff for now...

My main question to them was whether a development environment for access to
that board would also be available. I've got some code that could use a
60 MIPS coprocessor (:-)

Thought people might be interested. I thought it was an interesting approach
to the performance problem...

Ramin Firoozye'
rp&A Inc.
San Francisco, CA.

[ Disclaimer: I have no affiliation or interest in the company or the 
  product. Product specs are based on my non-fault-tolerant memory... ]