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Diffstat (limited to 'media/kiss_fft/BACKGROUND')
-rw-r--r-- | media/kiss_fft/BACKGROUND | 25 |
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diff --git a/media/kiss_fft/BACKGROUND b/media/kiss_fft/BACKGROUND new file mode 100644 index 000000000..dd43fa535 --- /dev/null +++ b/media/kiss_fft/BACKGROUND @@ -0,0 +1,25 @@ +BACKGROUND: + + I started coding this because I couldn't find a fixed point FFT that didn't +use assembly code. I started with floating point numbers so I could get the +theory straight before working on fixed point issues. In the end, I had a +little bit of code that could be recompiled easily to do ffts with short, float +or double (other types should be easy too). + + Once I got my FFT working, I was curious about the speed compared to +a well respected and highly optimized fft library. I don't want to criticize +this great library, so let's call it FFT_BRANDX. +During this process, I learned: + + 1. FFT_BRANDX has more than 100K lines of code. The core of kiss_fft is about 500 lines (cpx 1-d). + 2. It took me an embarrassingly long time to get FFT_BRANDX working. + 3. A simple program using FFT_BRANDX is 522KB. A similar program using kiss_fft is 18KB (without optimizing for size). + 4. FFT_BRANDX is roughly twice as fast as KISS FFT in default mode. + + It is wonderful that free, highly optimized libraries like FFT_BRANDX exist. +But such libraries carry a huge burden of complexity necessary to extract every +last bit of performance. + + Sometimes simpler is better, even if it's not better. + + -- Mark Borgerding
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