[sdiy] Hardware convolution box?

[cheater00 cheater00]

Interesting... whatever the way is that those shaders are implemented,
according to your numbers the Raspberry Pi 2 is less than twice as
expensive per GMACS as the most cost effective TI DSP, and obviously
has a gigabyte of ram rather than just a couple megabytes. And that's
comparing a $200 dsp chip to a complete $40 raspberry pi board with
everything on it so it's very unfair to the Pi. The question is
whether this kind of performance (24 GFLOPs) can be achieved from some
sort of realtime OS or only using their linux drivers.

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 4:36 AM, cheater00 cheater00
<cheater00 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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