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Our original thoughts on that was "nah, that'd be silly because GPUs are the wrong shape for audio workloads" ..however, having a few conversations with more k

Our original thoughts on that was "nah, that'd be silly because GPUs are the wrong shape for audio workloads" ..however, having a few conversations with more knowledgable people has changed our mind and we're definitely going to give it a try on Metal and Vulkan to see what happens. Should be interesting.

gugagore 7y ago
I'm curious what you mean by "wrong shape"? Because GPUs are for for very data-parallel workloads? Or because the latency is high?
- julesrms 7y ago
  Yeah, we made both of those assumptions. But it's apparently less true of the latest generation of compute engines. We probably won't bother with CUDA, but Metal is certainly a viable platform to try. It's one of those things where nobody really knows how it'll do until you try it. Also, we do know a few people who want to use SOUL to write audio code which does need high parallelism. It's not a super-common use-case for audio, but it does exist.
  - seandougall 7y ago
    I hope you'll consider writing up your results in a blog post or something! As I just mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have experimentally found latency with Metal compute to be too high to be feasible, but I would dearly love to be proven wrong, if there's a trick I'm missing.
    - cesaref 7y ago
      Yes, we'll certainly be writing it up. Similarly i'd be interested in reading about your experiences attempting the same if that's available.
reggieband 7y ago
I can understand the aversion to GPU (with "Graphics" being a primary point). Most ways of interfacing with the GPU use x,y,z, color, lighting wrappers around what is essentially a super powerful vpu. I also wonder how the traditional pipeline (e.g. vertex shading, fragment shading) can be repurposed for audio. I don't have any experience with Metal or Vulcan but my intuition is that audio DSP is going to include a healthy dose of linear algebra and multi-variate calculus. That points towards some kind of fit with the GPU. Given that basic GPUs are available on practically every device (including phones) it seems like a fantastic fit. Even audio hardware developers would benefit since it would open up access to commodity priced chips (rather than custom asic/fpga/whatever).
- julesrms 7y ago
  Yep. And even for very simple audio loads, there's often unused capacity in compute cores (even when running games) which would could do the job "for free" without bothering the CPU.

gugagore 7y ago

I'm curious what you mean by "wrong shape"? Because GPUs are for for very data-parallel workloads? Or because the latency is high?

julesrms 7y ago
Yeah, we made both of those assumptions. But it's apparently less true of the latest generation of compute engines. We probably won't bother with CUDA, but Metal is certainly a viable platform to try. It's one of those things where nobody really knows how it'll do until you try it. Also, we do know a few people who want to use SOUL to write audio code which does need high parallelism. It's not a super-common use-case for audio, but it does exist.
- seandougall 7y ago
  I hope you'll consider writing up your results in a blog post or something! As I just mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I have experimentally found latency with Metal compute to be too high to be feasible, but I would dearly love to be proven wrong, if there's a trick I'm missing.
  - cesaref 7y ago
    Yes, we'll certainly be writing it up. Similarly i'd be interested in reading about your experiences attempting the same if that's available.

reggieband 7y ago

I can understand the aversion to GPU (with "Graphics" being a primary point). Most ways of interfacing with the GPU use x,y,z, color, lighting wrappers around what is essentially a super powerful vpu. I also wonder how the traditional pipeline (e.g. vertex shading, fragment shading) can be repurposed for audio. I don't have any experience with Metal or Vulcan but my intuition is that audio DSP is going to include a healthy dose of linear algebra and multi-variate calculus. That points towards some kind of fit with the GPU. Given that basic GPUs are available on practically every device (including phones) it seems like a fantastic fit. Even audio hardware developers would benefit since it would open up access to commodity priced chips (rather than custom asic/fpga/whatever).

julesrms 7y ago
Yep. And even for very simple audio loads, there's often unused capacity in compute cores (even when running games) which would could do the job "for free" without bothering the CPU.