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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
05-01-2018, 03:05 PM
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LOL! I love science and technology. Part of my misspent youth involved mucking about with microprocessors back when 16 kilobytes was a HUGE amount of memory and it was possible to figure out what every transistor and every instruction was doing.
You are safe on wines. My knowledge is limited to looking at the pretty labels. Beer on the other hand......
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
05-01-2018, 02:16 PM
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Actually, ASIC-based bitcoin mining machines are faster that GPU-based bitcoin mining machines (and consume less electricity per coin found) but they are very specialized. Watt-for-watt bitcoin ASICs are on the order of 150-1000X faster than GPUs.
The accelerator chip on K1ii certainly can't match the ones on bitcoin machine at mining bitcoins but then the bitcoin ASICs can't clean images. ASICs are extremely specialized.
The point is that an ASIC is designed at the transistor or gate level to do one calculation extremely efficiently and quickly. For example, a CPU typically has 64-bit registers and does 64-bit math. The number of transistors needed to implement a 64-bit multiplier is quite large. But if all one needs is 14-bit multiplication, then the ASIC can contain 20 copies of a multiplier circuit in the same space that the CPU only has one. That alone can make an ASIC 20X faster than PC CPU. A CPU also has all sorts of circuitry dedicated to all the different kinds of functions that maybe aren't required for the pixel-cleaning function so that's more space that could be converted over to ASIC functionality. ASIC performance can be even higher if they implement complex mathematical functions directly rather then need some complex string of instructions.
It's fairer to say Ricoh won't waste it's money implementing a post-processing solution because very few people would pay extra for that.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
05-01-2018, 12:34 PM
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You're probably right that #3 is the real reason.:)
Doing #1 adds costs to the camera in terms of writing all the software to output the file in a readable fashion (convert an array in RAM into a readable file with required metadata), then add the menu commands to control the feature, update the manual to explain what they hell all these extra 36 MPix files are that are filing up the SD card, and write software for a post processor to use these files.
#2 may be false. The point of dedicated accelerator chips is that they are often much more powerful than any desktop PC (but only for an extremely specific tasks). A great example of that is bitcoin mining where dedicated chips are about 100,000 times faster than the best PC CPU.
Note: The K-1ii upgrade is not just for JPG. It's also attractive (if controversial) for RAW shooters because that is what the accelerator is cleaning. The accelerator actually sits between sensor and the camera's CPU and cleans the pixel data as it comes in.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
05-01-2018, 11:27 AM
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Three issues:
First, the accelerator may well have access to sensor calibration data (from the factory or pixel-mapping function) that is never exported to the SD card.
Second, dedicated chips can sometimes implement very specialized algorithms hundreds or thousands of times faster than code on a general processor.
Third, camera makers compete on the straight-out-of-camera quality of their RAW and JPG images. Even if Ricoh could release an upgrade for the image processing software, it would not help them sell cameras.
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Forum: Pentax K-1 & K-1 II
04-30-2018, 07:22 PM
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Reason #2 certainly eliminates one of the biggest reasons for you to upgrade.
I'm the opposite of you on ISO. I was always going for high-ISO films despite the gravelly grain. Currently, about 30% of the images I take are at ISO 3200 or higher.
For me, a boost in high-ISO is like getting a brand new camera (for 2/3rds less than a brand new camera).
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