I give up, I've got to show my ignorance..

[whakapu]

and ask what the #$#$ is a front-end LSI. Everybody is talking about how important and desirable and performance enhancing it is. Nobody, including difital-rev, appears to know what it means.

 

[Dareshooter]

I think it's a large scale integration chip.

 

[Zone8]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

--
Zone8: Although I am a handsome genius, when I stand in front of a mirror, I vaguely recognise the ugly idjit standing on the other side!
LINK: For B+W with Epson 1400 (and other models) using black ink only PLUS other useful tips:
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/epson1400-B&W.htm
Cleaning DSLR Sensors, including Kodak DSLR Factory Cleaning method:
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/KodakDCS-sensorcleaning.htm (Includes links to "bassotto's" images)
Solving back/front focus problems on Sigma and most other DSLRs
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/backfocus.htm
PDF format list of lenses you can print or download - covers Italian Flag YES/NO for DCS 14n but applies to others. http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/ItiFlagLensList.pdf

 

[Dareshooter]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

:-D

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

Not much use to me in this case as I know what the initials mean but have no idea about what it does.

--
Zone8: Although I am a handsome genius, when I stand in front of a mirror, I vaguely recognise the ugly idjit standing on the other side!
LINK: For B+W with Epson 1400 (and other models) using black ink only PLUS other useful tips:
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/epson1400-B&W.htm
Cleaning DSLR Sensors, including Kodak DSLR Factory Cleaning method:
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/KodakDCS-sensorcleaning.htm (Includes links to "bassotto's" images)
Solving back/front focus problems on Sigma and most other DSLRs
http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/backfocus.htm
PDF format list of lenses you can print or download - covers Italian Flag YES/NO for DCS 14n but applies to others. http://www.photosnowdonia.co.uk/ZPS/ItiFlagLensList.pdf

 

[FrancoD]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

OP ?

 

[Dareshooter]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

OP ?

Original Poster or post.

 

[FrancoD]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

OP ?

Original Poster or post.

yes, yes I know.

I agree with you, giving the full description is always best because some cannot RBTL

 

[Dareshooter]

Dareshooter wrote: I think it's a large scale integration chip.

Or perhaps "Lookhere Stupid Idiot"?

Personally, I ALWAYS give the actual full description by ALWAYS assuming others may NOT know what initials mean. Giving initials, assuming others will know what they mean, is a trait that I totally dislike. So, I completely sympathise with the OP.

OP ?

Original Poster or post.

yes, yes I know.

I agree with you, giving the full description is always best because some cannot RBTL

I was a bit slow to catch on there,sorry.

 

[pgb]

LSI, large scale integration was a term from the late 1970s when digital logic circuits became more dense and sophisticated and what took many dumb ic's could now be
packed in one ic but still nothing compared to today. Then there was VLSI, very LSI. After that they sort of gave up with new names as transistor counts grew exponentially.

This maybe the context that Sony is referring too, if so it's pure marketing hype as everything is now LSI x 100,000,000

 

[HatWearingFool]

and ask what the #$#$ is a front-end LSI. Everybody is talking about how important and desirable and performance enhancing it is. Nobody, including difital-rev, appears to know what it means.

If you look back you'all notice that the term LSI has appeared in previous Sony material.

This is a LSI front-end processor. Front end processors in general manage subsystems and push the resulting information to the general processor. In theory this means that your general processor is never waiting around for or managing a subsystem and instead is constantly processing information at max capacity.

LSI refers to many processes being integrated into a single chip. So for an example rather than having one processor to manage writing to memeroy cards and another to manage the autofocus process both processes have been integrated into this chip.

it seems that in this case Sony has created its own custom LSI Front-Processor rather than using an off the shelf component. If true this means it was very costly to develop and they must plan to get a lot of us out of it .

In theory, a well implemented front-end processor means that your main processors is never sitting around waiting for information or for a subsystem to do something so it can be running at 100% all he time. Of course in real life you will often get less than perfect results. Well implemented front-end processors mean you don't have to wait for images to be written to memory card before doing something else. Or if your processor is maxed out your autofocus system is still fully functional, etc.

People are only talking about this because:

a) apparently Sony developed their own rather than using a generic off the shelf component.

b) The new custom chip seems to work incredibly well.

As I noted before the term appears in a lot of past camera literature.

 

[HatWearingFool]

To expand a bit on previous point if this is truly a custom chip it was very expensive to develop and manufacture.

Which means they either plan to use it a lot or camera prices are going up. Probably a combination of the two.

I expected camera manufactures to go with more generic pieces to cut costs in a rapidly shrinking market, while this seems to indicate the opposite.

Although Sony has a long history of developing custom hardware to differentiate themselves in the game console market. With mixed success. Read up on the pluses and minus of the play station 2 to get an idea of how this can go.

It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend amoungst camera manufactures. It will mean higher prices for camera bodies in general.

 

[whakapu]

Thanks for that. Makes sense. The way they phrase it makes it sound like an LSI is a standard thing and their innovation is to put it at the "front end" but from what you say it's more just an upscaling of the functionality of that chip. I wonder if other manufacturers try to achieve similar results by having dual processors. Maybe Sony will do both with the A9.

 

[dwalby]

Thanks for that. Makes sense. The way they phrase it makes it sound like an LSI is a standard thing and their innovation is to put it at the "front end" but from what you say it's more just an upscaling of the functionality of that chip. I wonder if other manufacturers try to achieve similar results by having dual processors. Maybe Sony will do both with the A9.

I'm surprised to hear anybody use the term "LSI" anymore. That acronym was used decades ago to differentiate the level of integration on the chip, but everything has been Large Scale Integration for a long, long time. The term SoC (System on a Chip) is more common now.

Basically what they are saying is they developed a front end pre-processor that allows them to buffer up to 307 shots. I'm not in the business, but I suspect it wasn't anything particularly novel, just a new way to partition functionality to enhance the buffering capacity and average out the downstream processing load. Everybody does this to some extent, Sony appears to have gone a little crazy, I'm not sure I'd ever need to buffer 307 shots for anything.

 

[lostnotstranded]

[No message]

 

[HatWearingFool]

I suspect the term LSI was used because sony's chip design division http://www.sony-lsi.co.jp/e/ is called Sony LSI Design.

A little google works shows that many things that come out of this division have LSI on it, from gps chips to PlayStation IO controllers and including this front end processor.

GPS chip http://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...strys-first-1-chip-cmos-gps-lsi-73317807.html

Just a guess.

As I stated above though Sony has used the term in previous camera literature for years and no one batted an eye

 

[Zone8]

lostnotstranded wrote: --
"I never want to be someone stuck in one place, when the world is out there waiting, and calling out. I never want to see the world through the eyes of a screen — I want to experience it firsthand, for the world is a big place, much bigger than I am. There is so much out there to be seen and done and I can't bear to watch this life, my life, go by without seeing or doing any of it."

Is that the famous "Bl**dy Silly Information"?¿?¿? ;-)

 

[Mystery Gardener]

and ask what the #$#$ is a front-end LSI. Everybody is talking about how important and desirable and performance enhancing it is. Nobody, including difital-rev, appears to know what it means.

if you had typed it into Google...

BTW: It also stood for Love, Sex, Intelligence by the Shamen recorded in the early '90's...

Cheers, James

 

[whakapu]

Hey I've got one of their CDs, haven't played that in yonks. I'll find and play it today. Cheers.

 

[AnthonyL]

Hey I've got one of their CDs,

CD??

Not only have we got TLAs and FLAs but we've now got another TLA. I give up.

ok - 2,620,000,000 results (0.50 seconds) but I still had to look it up to be sure I'd got it right

 

[TheTom]

I would sy they probably USED it a lot - in the past. Now it is so much falling behind the needs (and the technolocial basis - it may well still be a 4x nm chip) that they decided to make a new one. This one likely is already planning to be usable for 100megapixel cameras and using hopefully 14nm for power power. It would make sense to totally overengineer this as preproduction costs are brutal on low volume (and yes, cameras are low volume) and you plan to use that for a couple of years.