6 May
2010
6 May
'10
7:17 a.m.
Niels,
IIRC, they put such a huge matrix on it because
they designed one
chip to slap on all their cards in that family. Saves money to just
design and fab one chip instead of a separate chip for each unit.
RME uses FPGA's, which is why they're so expensive
The Spartan 3 doesn't cost that much. What's in the firmware is what
makes them expensive.
(
http://www.rme-audio.de/en_support_techinfo.php?page=content/support/en_sup…
).
It's several bazillion of
these http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FPGA_cell_example.png that you
can connect up into any electronic circuit you want.
Not really. And it's only a few thousand.
I'd imagine they
designed it so that each FPGA takes a certain number of channels and
there's an addressing limit to how many FPGA's can be chained together
in a multi-channel rig... thus the 64 channels of inputs even though
each card has only 16 ins.
Well, there are constraints, like the number of dedicated multipliers,
you have almost no storage capabilities and so on. But if you think of
the 8192 mixers for example a MADI card has to calculate for each sample
period, you can use a divide and conquer strategy to add up the data and
be done with it in a matter of a few cycles. After all, 64 is a nice
two's complement :)
Flo
--
Machines can do the work, so people have time to think.
public key DA43FEF4 x-hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net