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Infinity Processin P ng

Generally y speaking ma ajor steps in audio design only happen ever ry decade or r so. The firs st realistic lar rge scale digital mixer was de eveloped in the mid 80s. This me 25,000 ICs s, 80 units of rack space and a required som 6kW of powe er just to make e a 48 channe el mixer! In ord der to reduce this to a slightly y more practi ical size custo om silicon was designed d for th he next gener ration of mixe ers. This doubled d the channe el count in one o third of the t space and a quarter of o the power r. This proce ess ut each develo opment was slo ow and costly. continued bu me of age wh hen the SHAR RC Digital mixers truly cam chip became e available aro ound 1994, th his offered mix xer designers off the shelf silicon which runs well in clusters, (aud dio processing g is a highly parallel p task; you y have to proc cess many cha annels at the same time) has h long word le engths and su uitable softwa are developme ent tools are ava ailable to creat te audio proce essing function ns. In the mid 90 0s up to 100 or o more of the e first generati ion SHARC chips were used to t create a lar rge scale mixi ing desk, the DSP D took nin ne units of rack space and a consumed some 500 wat tts. Over the next 15 yea ars, successive versions of these chips became mo ore powerful, goi ing from some e 120 Mflops to 2700 Mflop ps. (Mflops = Million Floating Point operations per Seco ond ommon way of o defining pro ocessing powe er). which is a co The latest Studer use of SHARC chips s in the Vista a 1 t generation of o SHARC chips uses only 8 of the current to mix near rly the same e number of f channels and a consume only 25 watts. Th here has been n about a 22 fo old increase in the processing power of f these SHAR RC chips over the last 15 year rs or so. Field Pro ogrammable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) ha ave become quit te widely use ed in the pro ofessional aud dio industry and they have also a become larger over the t ommitted sea of years. They are basically a huge unco gates that may m be linked d together to form multiplie ers, registers, adders and so forth. f Howeve er, programmi ing them to proc cess audio is more comple ex. For examp ple, changing a multiplier m used d to calculate e an FIR filter (a common tas sk in audio processing) p in nto a routine to calculate FFT Ts (such as metering m displa ay) is hard to do and prone to o errors. The lack of suitab ble developme ent tools to build d the FPGA co ode in the field also makes s it impossible fo or customers to construct their own DS SP configuration ns. Flexibility of configuration is a hu uge benefit to cus stomers as it allows them not n only to ada apt their mixer DSP D to meet th heir needs when they install it. It also allows changes to the con nfiguration af fter

pu urchase, for example th he provision of surround d ch hannels with the advent of high definition n TV and new w pr rocessing algo orithms such as automatic c mixing. For r this reason FPG GAs are not s seen by Stude er as suitable e for large scale audio a signal processing for the future. The use of f both SHAR RC and FPGA A devices for r au udio processin ng always requires significa ant R&D; each h tim me a new gen neration of chips become av vailable much h R& &D effort mus st be invested into new board design and d maybe new pro ogramming. F For this reason n, most audio o SP engines are replaced only every 5-7 years, in n DS or rder to maximi ise the return on R&D inves stment. Standard CP PU chips, the x86 types as used in huge e nu umbers for ge eneral compu uting, are very y suitable for r no on-real time signal processing. They are easy to o pr rogramme, ma any developm ment tools are available, the e sh hipping volum mes are huge, , so much eff fort goes into o de esigning the chips and th he PCBs use ed to support t them. Of vital sign nificance is the processing power of x86 6 ch hips has incre eased some 5 5,000 fold in the same 15 5 ye ears that SHARC chips hav ve increased in n power some e 16 6 fold. This doubling d of p power every 24 2 months is s kn nown as Mo oores Law. The dream m is to take e ad dvantage of th his effect in Stu uders new ge eneration DSP P en ngine. Modern n CPUs use m multiple hardw ware cores to o ob btain the huge e processing power offered d today (clock k sp peeds have reached a plateau due to physical l co onstraints). Currently high-end CPUs have h 8 to 10 0 co ores, each of which may be e set to run 2 threads thus s do oubling the processing power. This s multi-core technology is very suitable for large scale audio o pr rocessing due e to the para allel requireme ents of audio o mixing engines. . However, th here is a kille er problem; x86 CPUs are e esigned as general g purpo ose processor rs and every y de no ow and then, they t stop to do o some house ekeeping such h as s RAM refresh hing or temper rature sensing g. This is not a pr roblem for most m computin ng, a momen ntary pause wh hilst saving a file is of no consequence e but a single e missed audio sa ample results in an unaccep ptable click. In order to avoid this pr roblem, normal x86 based d au udio signal pr rocessing add ds audio buffe ering or delay y so o that CPU in nterrupts do not affect the flow f of audio. . Fo or real time live audio, th his delay or latency l is not t ac cceptable. The buffering a also reduces the efficiency y an nd thus reduc ces the channel count. Stud der has found d

STUDER - Infinity Core C - White Paper

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a clever way of isolating several of the CPU cores using a special version of Linux and stopping these cores from being interrupted. One core is left to run the desk communications and housekeeping whilst the rest of the cores concentrate on audio DSP for the highest channel count, without the need for buffering and the consequential audio latency. High end Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server boards are now available for the Intel E5 series processors. Two E5 processors may be fitted; each processor has 10 physical cores. Each physical core can run two threads or virtual cores thus doubling the processing capacity. Studer has achieved some 25 fully equipped (high quality EQ, Dynamics, Insert, Pan and fader) audio channels of processing on each virtual core, thus offering some 50 channels (mono equivalent) per hardware core; a dual processor board can thus process well over 800 channels even allowing one core for control and housekeeping. Clearly having developed this technology, the scalability offers both expansion of channel counts as processors with more cores become available (72 core processor chips are on the horizon) and the possibility of modest channel counts on basic COTS hardware for smaller mixers. More channels for the same money or enough channels for less money. The final part of this new concept is the need to provide a suitable audio interface system to connect the huge number of audio channels into and out of this new core. Studer has designed a new high capacity digital audio interface called A-Link. This fibre based audio interface uses a 3Gb data rate to offer 1536 audio channels per connection. A new PCI express card has been designed to fit into the COTS server board discussed above. This card is fitted with 12 A-Link interfaces capable of over 10,000 inputs and 10,000 outputs offering the huge I/O interface counts required of this new processing engine. We believe this new Infinity DSP engine will prove to be a significant milestone in the development of digital audio consoles and become a standard in the years ahead. We now have 800+ channels in 5ru consuming 600w in this DSP engine. In comparison with the DSP of the mid 80s, as discussed at the start of this article, we now process twenty times the number of channels in a sixteenth of the space using one tenth of the power. Thats progress!

Credits: Written by Andrew Hills, Product Director STUDER Professional Audio GmbH. Regensdorf, January.2014

STUDER - Infinity Core - White Paper

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