Hi,

I had a question in reference to the partitioning and caching of the current song. When a block of the current song is loaded, does any of it get loaded into a disk partition or does it go directly to the RAM for caching? Is this a PIO transfer or DMA?

The reason why I ask is I play mostly .wav files and have noticed that after it has played the first ~30 seconds to 1 minute of the song, there will be short break in the song during the next block fetch. After that, it doesn't have a break in the music (for up to hours). If a song is skipped forward or backward, it will do the same thing (as expected - It's doing a cache flush, right), and play the song for a short time have a short break, then resume the song(s).

A couple of other questions...

1) Will increasing the player RAM help expand the cache or is the cache a fixed size and the RAM would only expand the program space for 3rd party programs, display data, etc?

2) If the RAM was expanded for cache would it's performance be compromised due to a larger cache-flush requiring more time to do it? Will the break be more frequenct or a longer pause?

3) Is the cache 4 way set associative? If not, would that help the performance for the problem I mentioned above?

4) Does the player use the on-disk drive cache? Can it be utilized for cache queuing (sort of like L1, L2 cache so to speak)? Would that improve the performance if it was used?


The problem I mention above is only a minor annoyance. Mostly, I am really asking for an understanding of how things work, for general interest.

Is there a reference that defines the function of the partitions?

By expanding the partition sizes as you mentioned above, how would that improve performance?

Thanks again, and please excuse my ignorance on the operation of the player.

Ross