$199 supercomputer

[Tony Hardie-Bick]

On 07/10/12 14:25, Andrew Robinson wrote:
> This looks potentially interesting as a synthesis platform, it's a
> similar idea to the raspberry pi, but it has 2 arm cores and 64
> parallel processors for $199 (or 2 and 16 for $99). They claim 90
> gigaflop performance while drawing less than 3 watts of power. Add a
> box, a DAC and some keys/knobs/sliders....
>
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/99-raspberry-pi-sized-supercomputer-touted-in-kickstarter-project/

it looks like a great company with some really competitive ideas, not 
just about processing,
but also how they go about their business - very refreshing!

i would say, that, the power of r-pi is that you can write code on it, 
and expect it to run
not only on the hundreds of thousands of r-pi that already exist in the 
wild, but pretty much
on any other cpu, given the language you're writing in is c, java, 
python, whatever.

as soon as proprietary custom architectures are involved, commercial 
users may have good reason
to design their products around them, especially given this amount of 
processing power, but
for those learning dsp skills, the existence of a large online community 
is essential

adding parallel architecture programming on top of dsp, is... well... 
i'd just go drink more
coffee and stare out the window

if they can compile ordinary c-code, it would be great.

however... in the many other contexts, i think it's worth taking seriously

(as a musiciam i kind of object to the pretense over "special 
sauce/source" that is imposed
on those of us trying to work seriously with sound, which is why i don't 
get thrilled by
the prospect of yet more "special sauce" audio code being written for 
such chips as these).

that said, there is some genuine special sauce out there - the lexicon 
hall reverb algorithms
being a great example (these are documented to some degree, but not to 
the degree that they
can be fully replicated)

Tony (HB)

[plugs in reverb unit...]