[sdiy] Raspberry Pi 2 Synthesizer Project

[Jay Schwichtenberg]

If I would want to get the most out of the Pi I'd get rid of Linux and do my
own OS or use a true real-time OS. While Linux gets you up and running quick
there can be a lot of overhead that you don't need. Things like networking,
graphics and UI. Think that would give you more performance than writing asm
code. Also as another person said the ARM compilers generate pretty tight
code.

The processor has floating point so that should help but for things like
trig functions good lookup tables can speed things up a lot. By good lookup
tables I don't mean like just values for things. If there are things that
can be pre-computed build a table of structures and put those in. Things
like slopes between points to interpolate between points, parts of equations
that are constant and can be pre-computed and so on.

One thing that might be interesting is using the GPU. These vary with level
of complexity and how open they are but they've built super computers with
them. Just depends on the operations they have available and how easy they
are to access.

Jay S.