> The upgraded model DTL-15000 with the Performance Analyzer is especially rare and was a more expensive unit so developers tended to only have a couple and used them for debugging performance issues with their games.
I had a chance to work with one of these. It was amazing to get a non-intrusive profile that provided cycle-level data of all the chips in the Emotion Engine, as well as memory access and DMA state. The real take-away was how much more important memory access was to compute. Memory locality, cache preloading, and predictable control flow had a huge bearing on performance, and that's true more broadly for high-throughput DSP-style workloads including that in high-performance gaming.
I had a chance to work with one of these. It was amazing to get a non-intrusive profile that provided cycle-level data of all the chips in the Emotion Engine, as well as memory access and DMA state. The real take-away was how much more important memory access was to compute. Memory locality, cache preloading, and predictable control flow had a huge bearing on performance, and that's true more broadly for high-throughput DSP-style workloads including that in high-performance gaming.