[LAD] Has anyone ever played a plugin in realtime ... [related to:] hard realtime performance synth

[Emanuel Rumpf]

2010/2/8 Joshua Boyd <jdboyd at jdboyd.net>:
>
> However, I don't think it is generally right for linux audio until I can
> write cuda code (or a similar language) and have it run on Nvidia cards,
> ATI cards, at least one card using open source drivers, and plain CPUs
> using SSE (and/or threading).
>
> It seems that any quarter now, OpenCL may be close to meeting the
> qualifications I set (use with Nvidia, ATI, free drivers, and CPU only),
>

Actually OpenCL seems to already be supported, (in new hardware only ?),
by the large graphic players:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_opencl.html  (there's a lot of docu
here too !)
http://developer.amd.com/gpu/atistreamsdk/pages/default.aspx
http://www.khronos.org/opencl/

There's also the "CT Technology" from Intel (aquired from RapidMind),
which is claimed to be easier to code and less hardware-dependant than OpenCL.
http://software.intel.com/en-us/data-parallel/
http://software.intel.com/sites/products/collateral/hpc/ct/ct_newsletter1109.html

> however, I don't believe that the OpenCL language is as nice or easy to
> use as Cuda.  Is there any work on an open source clone of Cuda?
>
A link to a short Intro. The code looks acceptable at a first glance:
http://ati.amd.com/technology/streamcomputing/intro_opencl.html

I still somehow wonder, how cheap low MHz Chips can outperform my
GHz PC system. The answer seems to be parallelism of computations,
which the GPUs (or DSPs) support better than CPUs.
This also means, that faster CPUs won't necessarily bring
the effect we are waiting for.
(To play many software effects/instruments in an acceptable time.)

Anyway. If the PCs can't do it, someone has to create a new
system, or extend the PC anyway to make it capable.


-- 
E.R.