CD-i member Bill Juns asks: "Does anybody know anything about the LG GDI-700 running games faster then a regular cdi? I was testing it with Link: Faces of Evil and noticed it seemed a lot smoother and more responsive. So I tested how long it took Link to walk across the snow level and it took about 1.5 seconds more on my 450 and 490. That’s about a 10% speed increase on the 700."
The GDI-700 used a Motorola 68341 processor which has a quadruple-buffered serial input port. In contrast, the SCC 68070 processor used by all Philips players has only a doubly-buffered serial input port. The hardware difference means that processor load on Philips players can be up to triple that for the LG, depending on programming.
The 68341 on-chip devices are generally somewhat more complex than the corresponding ones for the 68070, but this could be simply due to technology advances (I believe the 68070 processor predates the 68341 and even CD-i by several years). I have no data on the relative speed, but I would guess the LG player to be at least a little faster as the 68070 was the "reference" design and it is almost never a good idea to go slower than this :-). With this experiment, it shows this is not just a theory. CD-i member Bill Juns recorded a platform scene in Link: Faces of Evil, walking from left to right in this snowy valley. He played the game on a CD-i 450 and recorded the time that it took to walk from left to right: 15,59 seconds:
He did the exact same scene on a LG GDI 700 CD-i player: He hooked up his LG GDI 700 CD-i player and played the exact same scene. The time that it took now is 14,3 seconds!
This seems to be a processor difference, rather than a simple PAL/NTSC issue. In fact, the LG GDI 7000 player has its own PAL/NTSC switch. Bill: "It wasn’t the most fun but I was able to test it in PAL and it runs at the same faster speed as NTSC."
[Thanks, Bill Juns, cdifan]