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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 p
by 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 agoLooking 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 agoThere'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).