[LAU] Creamware/Scope/SHARC/ALSA

[Batz]

Y-ellow Paul 'n' all.

At 08:36 PM 11/22/2010 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
>On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 8:26 PM, Batz <batzman-lau at all-electric.com> wrote:
>
> > Damn shame that. Some nice DSP power sitting there and pretty much useless.
>
>that's true. except that my 6 core 3.2GHz AMD + mobo + 8GB of RAM cost
>me about US$650, and has more DSP power than probably any of the
>original Creamware cards. and rather than run "on linux", it can
>actually run linux. manage it with cpusets and SCHED_FIFO and you've
>more bang for the buck than the creamware stuff, i think.

That's a pretty fair point. I hadn't really thought of it from that angle. 
Many years ago I was involved in designing a DSP sound card with the rather 
futuristic title of infoPAD. (I'm sure Mr. Jobs would disapprove.) Of the 6 
DSP96Ks we were using, (in devel) there was an OS bottleneck. It virtually 
took the power of one of the DSPs to manage the other 5. Spread over all 6 
DSPs but such was the OS overhead. So in theory now, with 6 cores, each 
with it's own number cruncher, and it's own main processor, it should 
actually manage the number crunching much more frugally. Although in 
reality the OS overhead would be much greater. Since it is largely a 
general purpose OS. Then again, 6 cores are 6 cores. We didn't have that 
advantage. Best we could muster was an MCS51 as an arbitrator. We didn't 
even have the luxury of ATMEL MCS51s back then. And of course, even DSP96Ks 
seem rather quaint by today's standards.

And you make a good point for me at this time. As I'm still struggling with 
defining what hardware to build this project upon.

Thanks again for that. Much appreciated.

Be absolutely icebox.


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