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  • Of possible interest - especially for MIR project

    A new supercomputer PCIe card was announced recently at NAB and MacWorld by a company called Ambric. Designed to be used in both PCs and Macs and consisting of 336 RISC processors, it is currently intended for video production but it seems possible that it could be adapted to other purposes.It is a low power (15 watt) device and the projected price is $3500.

    Check out this article:

    http://www.macobserver.com/article/2008/02/04.1.shtml 


  • Tempting! Thanks for the hint, Steve.

    OTOH, this would be "dedicated hardware", a concept we have decided to avoid for the MIR, due to the immanent problem of "built-in" obsolescence. General-purpose computers may be not as fast as DSP-farms (yet), but it's much easier and cheaper to update them to the latest generation of hardware, or to use an older machine for less demanding tasks, making the initial investment more cost-effective.

    /Dietz - Vienna Symphonic Library
  • just to step in without beeing asked ....

    i've been also fascinated several times in the past by the power of grafic processors (which can also be *abused* for audio renderings) - the latest occasion has been the SDK from nVidia for their GeForce 8 which offers really fantasic performance on the GPU.

     

    but then to notice that actually the SDKs and programming platform as such change every year makes this less tempting ... you can be sure that the hardware is outdated as soon as you finished developing ...

    christian


    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
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    Stepping in here without being asked, too. The comment about graphical powers being used for caclulations reminded me on the capabilities the PS3 got when used for things like Folding@Home - it produces impressive results at those calculation units in a network (with a clever algorithm distributing the tasks and dividing those into calculatable chunks). Anyway, I always thought that GPUs weren't as suited as CPUs because of less exact calculations or being only good at matrix operations.

    PolarBear


  • I made this suggestion myself a couple of time. Then I decided to have a look at doing this kind of development myself just to get an idea of the potential. I made some experiments, just to get the idea.

    The biggest problem of using theses cards, especially the graphics card  is the fact, that you can process video pictures asynchronous.

    This means, that you can have pieces of the picture calculated, give it to various processors and collect the results at the end and assemble a final picture and show the frame.

    With audio, you always have to be in sync, in time. You cannot play note/audio in time ahead  and assemble them later. So, music/audio is always a function over time. That is what the basic formulas of Fourrier seems to be about. (When I remember the forum right, than Dietz had some philosophical events with Fraunhofer about this).

    And that is where things like nvidia falls short. Getting the Geforce (and all the co-cards) to be in sync with calculating audio effects in time in serial sync is the problem.

    Or you can use the Motorola-DSPs, but look at Creamware, Kyma, TC Powercore and all the others: They have the problem, that with faster and faster "all purpose PC's", the advantage of dedicated hardware is more and more obsolete.

    So I can imagine, if you are in for the long run (as I would guess VSL will do) youre best bet is common HW.


    Too old for Rock n Roll. Too young for 9th symphonies. Wagner Lover, IRCAM Alumni. Double Bass player starting in low Es. I am where noise is music.