dcollins wrote on Tue, 21 June 2005 05:59 |
Bob Boyd wrote on Mon, 20 June 2005 11:53 | Well, here it is from the man himself...
I emailed Daniel about the possibility of a PCI card and he replied:
"A PCI card is too small for our requirements. Regards, Daniel"
|
I'm not qualified to get Daniel's lunch, but I wonder. Today's fancy video card has more horsepower than a lowly stereo eq, doesn't it? And a wire straight to the PSU.
A Watt or two per part shouldn't be a problem, even if you have four or five big ones.
Even Sonic was able to get five 56k's in there!
DC
|
Well, the raw horsepower would fit on a PCI, agreed, but we had some other design constraints, like:
- platform independence, i.e. not only PC or MAC but also hardware type remote control w/o computer (e.g. for products we plan in our highend-hifi department or for specific one of a kind applications or for OEMs).
- versatile, modular audio interfacing, including analog for certain applications, which would mean a breakout box if we used a PCI card.
- Modularity of DSP power which allows for upgrading in terms of number of DSPs as well as type of DSPs (new generations of DSPs).
- protection of intellectual property, which is simpler in an external box.
- physical presence of a Weiss box - which looks good in any studio
The Powerhouse (as we call the box) has the following features:
- Up to 10 Sharc DSPs (5 modules at 2 sharcs each) with a total of up to 80 MWords of fast RAM
- 4 slots for audio interfaces, the first interface we designed is an 8 channel AES/EBU I/O in one slot
- versatile syncing, (almost) no restrictions to sampling rates, e.g. DXD is possible
- Ethernet / firewire connection to the host computer
- MIDI / RS232 ports for special applications
Daniel
www.weiss.ch(there isn't anything about the Powerhouse on our site yet)