ron chappel wrote:
Interesting
do you think they use generic,off the shelf cpu's and other chips?
Not exactly, but you might be surprised to learn that the main processor instruction set in the 10D and 300D is '386 compatible, and runs an embedded version of DOS called DataLight. In fact, there are some programs floating around (Linux-based, if I recall) that will let you 'mount' the camera via the USB cable as a series of DOS-based drive letters, and let you download and examine the executable files that are stored in the camera's internal FLASH.
The Canon Digic processor(s) though, are specialized proprietary image processor(s) -- probably SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) arrays.
In the 1990's, I worked at a machine vision company that used a 25 MHz RISC-based 32-bit processor (the Intel i960CA), driving a 128-bit wide SIMD array of LSI 10K gate array processors, to produce 500 MPixels/sec of grayscale binary morphology. The hardware to do it at the time took up the better part of two VME bus cards, but all that could be shrunk into a couple of chips these days, with similar reductions in power requirements.
And technically, RISC is not the same as DSP, nor SIMD, for that matter, although the distinctions can get hazy, depending on the application at hand, mainly because you can sometimes emulate one or the other of the technologies with one of the other ones (usually not very efficiently).