1) Those license fees approach zero as you produce more units.
2) If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
2) If I'm not mistaken they're not general purpose computers. If they were what would be the point? Why not use a math coprocessor?
They are not general-purpose, but that doesn't mean they're not easily re-programmable either. Consider the example of GPUs.
I want to say some SNES games used a DSP chip, there are several known to emulator authors, including two versions that used the exact same hardware with different microcode (and therefore different abilities). So it's been done before at least.
The accelerator units are usually filters that operate over a region of memory while processor is busy computing something else. These can be made fixed function, however most of them are programmable to support multiple steps in codec processing.
TI I believe is the largest vendors of DSPs for hardware decoding/encoding