Rob Watts
Member of the Trade: Chord Electronics
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- Apr 1, 2014
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PC's are very restricted in what they can do for real time signals. You simply can't replicate the processing that Dave does in a PC - simply because PC processors are sequential serial devices with a very limited number of cores. When you are doing a doing a FIR filter (a tap) you need to read from memory the audio data; read from memory the coefficient data; multiply the numbers together;then read the accumulated data and add that to the previous multiplication; then save the result. Lots of things to do in sequence. With an FPGA you can do all of these things in parallel at once, so a single FIR tap can be accomplished within a single clock cycle (obviously pipelined) - you are not forced to do things in sequence.
With Dave I have 166 dsp cores running, plus FPGA fabric to do a considerable amount of further processing. You simply can't do that in a PC. To give you another example - converting DSD into DoP. You need a quad core processor to do this manipulation in real time - otherwise you get drop-outs - but in a FPGA I could do this simple operation thousands of times over, and at much faster rates than DSD256.
What some people do not understand is how capable FPGA's are and how widespread they are used - the backbone to the internet? FPGA's. Search engines? FPGA's. Why? because an FPGA is fantastic at doing fixed real time processing - it takes small die area, and can do complex operations with very low power. Mojo for example has 44 dsp cores, uses sophisticated filtering to 104 MHz, and noise shapes at this rate - but does all this whilst consuming only 0.45 W. There is no way any PC consuming huge amounts of power can do this.
Intel last year acquired Altera (an FPGA company) for $16.7 billion because they understand that the future of processing is with FPGA's
A second issue is not what you can do but how you can do it - it is not just about raw power, but how the filter algorithm is designed. I have put many thousands of hours and over twenty years improving and understanding how to make a transparent interpolation filter; and I am still learning things today.
And a third point is that a DAC is not simply a data processing machine but it has got crucial analogue parts too. If I dropped the WTA requirement, I would still need the same FPGA in order to do the noise shaping and other functions.
Rob
With Dave I have 166 dsp cores running, plus FPGA fabric to do a considerable amount of further processing. You simply can't do that in a PC. To give you another example - converting DSD into DoP. You need a quad core processor to do this manipulation in real time - otherwise you get drop-outs - but in a FPGA I could do this simple operation thousands of times over, and at much faster rates than DSD256.
What some people do not understand is how capable FPGA's are and how widespread they are used - the backbone to the internet? FPGA's. Search engines? FPGA's. Why? because an FPGA is fantastic at doing fixed real time processing - it takes small die area, and can do complex operations with very low power. Mojo for example has 44 dsp cores, uses sophisticated filtering to 104 MHz, and noise shapes at this rate - but does all this whilst consuming only 0.45 W. There is no way any PC consuming huge amounts of power can do this.
Intel last year acquired Altera (an FPGA company) for $16.7 billion because they understand that the future of processing is with FPGA's
A second issue is not what you can do but how you can do it - it is not just about raw power, but how the filter algorithm is designed. I have put many thousands of hours and over twenty years improving and understanding how to make a transparent interpolation filter; and I am still learning things today.
And a third point is that a DAC is not simply a data processing machine but it has got crucial analogue parts too. If I dropped the WTA requirement, I would still need the same FPGA in order to do the noise shaping and other functions.
Rob
