10 Dec
2012
10 Dec
'12
5:33 p.m.
On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 11:12 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 10:56 AM, Patrick Shirkey
<
pshirkey(a)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