[LAD] opencl [was Re: [LAU] ANN: CMKeyboard]

[Bill Gribble]

On Tue, 2012-12-11 at 02:56 +1100, Patrick Shirkey wrote:
> On Mon, December 10, 2012 10:42 pm, Bill Gribble wrote:
> We have several headless machines running GPU's with thousands of
> processing units available.  Much more power than the first "Lord of the
> Rings" movie was made with.

Good stuff to have available!  Even on a normal laptop with external GPU
chipset and the builtin Intel one too there's a pretty powerful idle
processor.  That's why I started getting interested.  Also, I penciled
out a hardware setup that would allow a laptop to add external PCI
graphics cards for this purpose, seems like a great choice for
convolution reverbs, long FIR filters for linear-phase EQ, etc. 

I mention interactions because there are a few commercial
GPU-accelerated audio plugins for Windows (convolution reverb was all I
could find, can't remember the name offhand), and I spent some time
scraping forums at the manufacturer, gearslutz, etc for information
about real-world performance.  The reports were that the latency for
executing OpenCL kernels was pretty unpredictable, and seemed to be
related to resource allocation by the desktop OS.  Not an issue in your
case, nor in any case where you have a dedicated chip (or render farm)
for your own purposes. 

Thanks,
Bill Gribble