[sdiy] Proposed DSP board

[Eric Brombaugh]

cheater cheater wrote:
> 1. if you use an AVR you'll be able to use the new uCApps MIOS. This
> is a complete system which solves almost everything you need in a
> synth as far as janitorial work goes. They're moving away from PIC for
> the exact purpose of getting more power. It's all coded in C so you
> and others can use it so much more easily

As Samppa noted, the MIDIbox community is now using the STM32 ARM 
processor these days, not the AVR. ARMs are nice, writing in C is nice.

> 2. a dsPIC is very inefficient. You won't be able to do much with it;
> or with any reasonably priced dsp chip for that matter

[citation needed]

> the movement
> as I understand it (and as I was told by people smarter than me :) )
> is away from classical dsp's since they have a very limited number of
> multiplication units; for hardware, your best bet is an FPGA now,
> which allows you to do umpteens of multiplications in one cycle. I
> don't remember the exact numbers for FPGA, but even the comparison
> with a core 2 duo was staggering.

While it's true that FPGAs can do a lot more operations in parallel than 
most DSPs available now, that hardly puts them in the dustbin. If you 
code your algorithms carefully and set your expectations right then you 
can do some very useful things with low-end DSPs like the dsPIC.

That said, there are some fun things going on in the FPGA world. :)

Eric