4 ms·

"With Elk hardware companies can move away from dedicated chips and use general purpose ARM and x86 CPUs without any compromise in terms of latency, performance

"With Elk hardware companies can move away from dedicated chips and use general purpose ARM and x86 CPUs without any compromise in terms of latency, performance and scalability." Less diversity decreases competition and overall technological development. In the 1980s, some OS developers actually blamed Unix for stalling the progress of OS research. Wouldn't a world of Arm based synthesizer be kind of stagnant? Sure you can dream that compatibility allows more open platforms, but we all know hardware companies always end up making the end product proprietary anyway. To be fair, I don't know a lot about hardware. I'd also like to guess that the world of music electronics has been longing for some sort hardware medium to sort out the mess of obscure ISA's and poor documentation that hardware engineers have to put up with.

InitialLastName 5y ago
I work in that industry; at this point most of the big players are on either ARM SOCs or SHARC, with a few plucky folks basically making x86_64 servers. Once performance is comparable for the workload, ARM-based synthesizers aren't inherently any more stagnant than DSP-based synths, in the same way that ARM-based tablet apps aren't necessarily stagnant; if anything, the freedom from crappy compiler lock-in, incomprehensible instruction pipelines, assembly code, and (as you say) poor documentation. Moving to ARM, GCC/LLVM support, and (eventually) Linux makes all the things other than making neat sounds (UI, interconnect, networking, power management, etc) easier, so that developers can spend more time on the creative bits.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Looking at other FOSS OS efforts competing against Linux on the hardware space, I imagine that long term it might not be Linux per se, rather POSIX that will win out, with Linux being one among many. I mean stuff like Zephyr, NuttX, mbed, RTOS, Azure RTOS.
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    There's a range of capabilities for sure, depending on how close you want your device to get to "This is a PC". Mbed, FreeRTOS, and the other small RTOS's are nice for what they are, but their support for more advanced things like multi-core operations, filesystems, multi-tasking and multi-user functions are still limited (and, IMO should remain so as they expand their support for lower-performance devices).
boomlinde 5y ago
> Wouldn't a world of Arm based synthesizer be kind of stagnant? The computer in a digital synthesizer is an implementation detail to the consumer. What they're buying is the synthesis engine, the way it sounds, performs and interoperates, the case, the user interface etc. In that sense the CPU used seems about as relevant to stagnation as the screw heads used for the case.

InitialLastName 5y ago

I work in that industry; at this point most of the big players are on either ARM SOCs or SHARC, with a few plucky folks basically making x86_64 servers. Once performance is comparable for the workload, ARM-based synthesizers aren't inherently any more stagnant than DSP-based synths, in the same way that ARM-based tablet apps aren't necessarily stagnant; if anything, the freedom from crappy compiler lock-in, incomprehensible instruction pipelines, assembly code, and (as you say) poor documentation. Moving to ARM, GCC/LLVM support, and (eventually) Linux makes all the things other than making neat sounds (UI, interconnect, networking, power management, etc) easier, so that developers can spend more time on the creative bits.

pjmlp 5y ago
Looking at other FOSS OS efforts competing against Linux on the hardware space, I imagine that long term it might not be Linux per se, rather POSIX that will win out, with Linux being one among many. I mean stuff like Zephyr, NuttX, mbed, RTOS, Azure RTOS.
- InitialLastName 5y ago
  There's a range of capabilities for sure, depending on how close you want your device to get to "This is a PC". Mbed, FreeRTOS, and the other small RTOS's are nice for what they are, but their support for more advanced things like multi-core operations, filesystems, multi-tasking and multi-user functions are still limited (and, IMO should remain so as they expand their support for lower-performance devices).

boomlinde 5y ago

> Wouldn't a world of Arm based synthesizer be kind of stagnant? The computer in a digital synthesizer is an implementation detail to the consumer. What they're buying is the synthesis engine, the way it sounds, performs and interoperates, the case, the user interface etc. In that sense the CPU used seems about as relevant to stagnation as the screw heads used for the case.