Speed of hardware vs speed of software..?

Question

So, I know that MP3 players (usually) have a DSP chip, which (decompresses the music files) and speeds us the processing and hence playing the music in real-time. If we had done this on software, this would be slow and so music would not be played in real time.
My question is , could somebody pl quantize this and give some numbers to put these things in perspective..like if we do it on software, what would be the rate of music playing etc..

or give another application and speed obtained when it's done on hardware and when done on software..

Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there are too many variables here to give you a meaningful number, as there's a bazillion ways to do this. You can do this with a general purpose CPU, or a chip that does MP3 decoding in hardware, or even one that does only "partial" decoding. There are just way too many ways to do this hardware-wise.

Answer 2

Vs. front side bus, and Memory.