Re: Audio Units and OpenCL?
Re: Audio Units and OpenCL?
- Subject: Re: Audio Units and OpenCL?
- From: Richard Dobson <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 09 Sep 2009 19:05:46 +0100
James McCartney wrote:
Almost all research in the parallel/multiprocessing/concurrency
communities is about maximizing throughput and utilization and there is
not even very much awareness of real time issues like minimizing or
bounding latency except among the real-time financial folks.
Ironic, one way and another!
So most
known architectures and techniques that are published in the literature
are not going to be beneficial for audio. As to awareness within Apple
of these issues, we in CoreAudio and in some other media groups are
aware and are always doing what we can to make others groups aware: fast
is not real time. slow is not necessarily not real time. fast enough
with reliable bounds on latency is real time.
There was a panel at SC'08 on HPC for audio (I think mainly from the
Berkeley Labs folk); I have no idea of how that went, or if anyone, so
to speak, took note. The real irony I think is that the requirements you
described for HPC audio (or as I have called it, "HiPAC") if properly
followed up in research, commercial or academic, would surely be of
benefit to the wider HPC community generally (and as we know, Apple
already has mileage in the HPC community). My own modest attempts at
getting academic research funding in the UK have failed because (all
other factors aside) in the grand scheme of things it is an unimportant
topic.
But Apple is in a unique position in this respect given it has in
principle full control over both hardware and software, and has an
obvious interest in supporting audio. We clearly need some kind of
heterogeneous computing solution to give us both serial and parallel
power with tight deadlines. Such as an audio equivalent to the GPU,
tightly coupled with the rest of the chipset. That must have attractions
for those financial folk at the very least. I had hoped that OpenCL +
Snow Leopard were going to be pretty close to that, but seemingly not.
Next year I expect to see 16-core machines. OS X 'Cheetah' perhaps?
Richard Dobson
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