M@ and The Dweez'

[Martin Naef]

On 10.10.2011 10:10, Peter Korsten wrote:
> So how have things developed since the last time I looked into a 56K
> data book in the 1990s? Jay used to be really into DSP, but he appears
> to have shifted his interest to small, embedded boards.

Good question. Last time I checked, the 56K family looked rather 
stagnant. But that's been a while...

> And how relevant are the developments with GPUs? Nvidia will happily
> sell you a PCI-e board that is basically a re-branded graphics card for
> an amount of money that has your jaw drop and your teeth fall out. But

Well, there's a bit more than that in the Tesla cards - mostly on the 
side of improved reliability (e.g. thermal management and ECC memory) 
and service contracts. But yes, you're paying A LOT more for the same 
chip with different firmware...

> perhaps you don't want a GTX 580 with its heat production in a
> professional audio system...

You could always get a smaller, passively cooled version. But having 
looked into the architecture, I'm not so sure you'd really want to use 
the current generation GPUs for the majority of audio tasks. For a 
start, they're really not built for low-latency operation. And 
secondary, they're essentially vector machines that need *massive* data 
parallelism (ten-thousands of elements is best...). If you run huge FFTs 
or software samplers with thousands of voices, the GPU would be your 
friend. But who does?

Martin