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

[David Robillard]

On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 11:12 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Patrick Shirkey <
> pshirkey at boosthardware.com> 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.
> >
> > > Still worth exploring though, and a "cl~" processor for my system is
> > > definitely on the todo list.
> > >
> >
> > We are exploring the possibilities here too. Essentially a library that
> > allows sending specific operations across a netjack cluster for realtime
> > multimedia processing.
> >
> 
> you might want to check the latency before you get too far into plans like
> this. i've heard that it is improving, but still not really what one would
> expect of a "realtime FX processor".

Indeed.  Crazy throughput, but transferring to and from the GPU kills
you.  Worth investigating anyway since many-core is probably going to
stick around and become faster, but I doubt current GPUs can achieve
reasonable real-time audio latency.

I think the programmable GPUs on recent Intel chips (Ivy Bridge) is an
interesting development; though much less powerful and far less cores,
they have full memory bandwidth (the other thing that kills you), and
presumably minimal latency since it's on-die.  Adding 8 or so cores may
not be in the same realm as adding hundreds, but for many things the
latency and memory bandwidth dominates anyway so a billion cores on a
GPU would still be slower.  Anything memory bound is much slower even on
the best GPUs.  I'll happily take 8 extra cores on the CPU...

Unfortunately they're not programmable on Linux yet, only on Windows.  A
complete joke if they're targeting scientific GPGPU, and useless for LAD
too.  Intel seriously needs to get on this and fix their drivers...

-dr

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