[sdiy] Hardware convolution box?

[cheater00 cheater00]

Neil aren't the shader engines just in software on arm? Isn't it
better to just use the arm directly?

On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 9:49 PM, Neil Johnson <neil.johnson71 at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you can work with the slightly odd floating point format in single
> precision GLES shader language then the shader engines in the Raspberry Pi
> (1, 2 & 3) will give you about 24 GFLOPS.
>
> Neil
>
>
> On 13 Feb 2017 20:38, "cheater00 cheater00" <cheater00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 8:55 PM,  <paula at synth.net> wrote:
>> I looked at starting the Chameleon II project with Terry Shultz, but sadly
>> this was around the time freescale started pulling out of the DSP world.
>>
>> Your choices for "DSP" now are to look at something like the Analog
>> Devices
>> Blackfin/Sharc family, look at FPGA (who wants to roll their own DSP) or a
>> fast ARM Processor (like the Axoloti).
>>
>> I guess the problem is that ultimately it comes down to the market
>> appetite
>> for such products. The Chameleon was great, but never really got the
>> market
>> it needed to survive. the Axoloti looks fab, but I doubt it's being made
>> in
>> serious volume (>1000 per year).
>>
>> What is nice is to see a resurgence of love for DSP and DSP programming :)
>>
>> Paula
>
> I think just the first three uses are going to be good enough to find
> enough market share between them to warrant a board run. Many people
> already have lots of stomp boxes and they will pay $2500 to get an
> Axe-FX and use it only for cab simulation... and then they only get a
> few msec worth of impulse response time budget... that's fairly weak,
> and it's not difficult to beat.
>
> But either way if we can agree upon some sort of platform we can at
> least go and buy similar dev boards and start plugging away at it. I
> think the TI TMS320C is the best platform because the upper end is
> very high and you can start with very cheap chips; the most powerful
> board from them is $600, and it's an amazing powerhouse.
>
> If it turns out we have a nice platform going that we could share with
> the world we can think about spinning up some boards.
>
> As Veronica points out the most difficult part is to set up a company
> and stay afloat. So don't. Develop for dev boards, we can afford them,
> and it's for us, so we don't care about mass market appeal. Rather
> than set up a company that'll stock this stuff, go the Arduino route,
> and create a generic platform anyone can "make" with. A board like
> this could have appeal for computer vision, robots, quad copters, sdr,
> etc. This should keep enough people interested who would pay for e.g.
> group buys.
>
> The #1 objective should be that anyone who hasn't done any embedded
> programming before should be able to get into this within days,
> especially without hardware. It would be a great idea to have
> something like a qemu based emulator, even if it doesn't work at full
> speed. An even better idea is something that simply runs in the
> browser. This way anyone who wants to keep the platform alive, can.
>
> It would be a good idea to keep this future minded as 5 years from now
> nVidia will have entered the dsp business full-scale and their chips
> will kill anything that's out there. I spoke to John Carmack and he
> said they are certainly going to do this. Tim Sweeney confirmed that
> the GPUs as they are now are 10x more powerful per dollar as the best
> of the best DSPs in my survey earlier on in this thread. TI and AD
> have no contender in the GPU based dsp space so they will lose out in
> the end; nVidia will dominate the market for automotive applications.
> They've already started building self-driving-car embedded modules
> with their GPUs on them, and eventually they'll do their own silicon.
> So it would possibly be a good idea to keep the algorithms modular, so
> that the concrete implementation of anything that needs to be in
> assembler can be replaced in the future. This would also prevent
> "platform death".
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