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Thedrick

In class Kayvon showed us how quickly his camera can take photos in succession, and how the rate slowed as the memory on the camera filled. The fixed-function chip on his camera is very quick at handling RAW -> JPEG conversion. He then did a similar conversion on his Macbook and showed that it takes about 8 to 12x longer to convert an image using a general purpose CPU.

kayvonf

I'd like to clarify that my experiment was largely for demonstration purposes. I don't know if the comparison was fair because I don't know if the software on my Mac (Lightroom) and the algorithm used by the camera's ASIC are the same. Of course, both perform a good quality RAW-to-JPG conversion, so if Lightroom is in fact using a slower algorithm, they probably shouldn't. ;-)

The point is that JPEG compression is something that is highly optimized in hardware these days, and it is very unlikely that a power-conscious mobile device would perform this operation in software on a general-purpose processor.