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> cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software Hardly. Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery b

> cheaply, quickly, and effectively done in software Hardly. Power usage in SW(or FPGA) vs ASIC is easily an order of magnitude difference. For most battery based solutions software based signal processing is right out. Latency is another, your CPU is going to introduce both jitter and long latency compared to a discrete software solution. Software also can't handle raw speeds involved in a lot of things. There's not a single CPU out there that can natively handle 5GHz wifi off of the wire. That's why even direction conversion SDRs use a frequency mixer to lower the data rate down to something a DSP can handle.

jacobolus 9y ago
By cheap, quick, and effective, I’m talking about human labor, not cost of silicon doodads for a commercial-scale product. If you imagine we’re talking about someone’s hobby prototype projects, designing all of those things you mentioned takes skill, experimentation, time, parts, assembly, likely a team collaboration, etc. The combinations of parts get conceptually complicated and the feedback loops during the development process get slower and slower. Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. But that’s a very different context than what the people several posts up are talking about. P.S. if you pile your posts with abbreviations your readers have a harder time figuring out what you are talking about.
- twtw 9y ago
  Loads of people do FPGA development for hobby projects, which isn't "software." FPGAs can dramatically improve problems with latency, jitter, power over software implementations, yet are still quite accessible.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Isn't it software? What is it, then?
    - meuk 9y ago
      I think it is more commonly referred to as hardware design (or simply 'digital design'). I think it's also reasonable to call it software - but I think that even the 'real' hardware development (of ASICs) is starts with a VHDL design.
    - vvanders 9y ago
      It's more like a million jumper switches(called LUT in FPGA parlance) that you can configure. It doesn't share much, if anything with serial software and you use the same tools(VHDL/Verilog/etc) as ASIC design.
- vvanders 9y ago
  > Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. Or power, plenty of battery powered things in the hobby space where using discrete hardware optimized for low power usage is necessary. Discrete hardware doesn't have to be an ASIC, it's still possible to string together a opamps and other SMD parts pretty easily these days.

jacobolus 9y ago

By cheap, quick, and effective, I’m talking about human labor, not cost of silicon doodads for a commercial-scale product. If you imagine we’re talking about someone’s hobby prototype projects, designing all of those things you mentioned takes skill, experimentation, time, parts, assembly, likely a team collaboration, etc. The combinations of parts get conceptually complicated and the feedback loops during the development process get slower and slower. Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. But that’s a very different context than what the people several posts up are talking about. P.S. if you pile your posts with abbreviations your readers have a harder time figuring out what you are talking about.

twtw 9y ago
Loads of people do FPGA development for hobby projects, which isn't "software." FPGAs can dramatically improve problems with latency, jitter, power over software implementations, yet are still quite accessible.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Isn't it software? What is it, then?
  - meuk 9y ago
    I think it is more commonly referred to as hardware design (or simply 'digital design'). I think it's also reasonable to call it software - but I think that even the 'real' hardware development (of ASICs) is starts with a VHDL design.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    It's more like a million jumper switches(called LUT in FPGA parlance) that you can configure. It doesn't share much, if anything with serial software and you use the same tools(VHDL/Verilog/etc) as ASIC design.
vvanders 9y ago
> Obviously there are reasons to use custom-designed hardware if you are a corporation and you are building a million identical devices, or if you have extreme bandwidth or latency needs that a modern CPU literally can’t keep up with, etc. Or power, plenty of battery powered things in the hobby space where using discrete hardware optimized for low power usage is necessary. Discrete hardware doesn't have to be an ASIC, it's still possible to string together a opamps and other SMD parts pretty easily these days.