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very interesting, Marcuspocus, Dark3zn.
so now we can say firewire is fast enough, but the conversion to PCI could be a problem.
I think I'm gonne ask the 'helpdesk' of a Mac computer magazin about it.
In the meantime, if someone knows more about it...
(I know there are external audiocardboxes with firewire, like M-Audio).

There is also TC Powercore FireWire. So firewire is good for audio (to be honest even USB is enough) but we are talking here about the translation 1:1 of PCI to firewire. I think CW should concentrate on new boards (or FW outboard boxes) rather than developing a translator. This would mean 2 translations in one system: the software (SFP) is PC core, translated to MacOS and then the dataflow from PCI to firewire and then again to PCI. Hmmm... this would be difficult

Yes, even USB is useable, depends on what you need :

Look at this "MACKIE SPIKE XD2", they even have Sharc DSP inside this thing!

Personnaly, i would like a firewire box, packed with Sharc DSP + Lotsa RAM, plus ability to plug in the A16U or other 3rd party devices , like any mLan device for example. To add more io to the thing. All should be able to run in standalone mode, without any pc or mac.

Since PC & Mac always change, i won't buy no more PCI cards for now.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marcuspocus on 2003-09-25 03:01 ]</font>

dArKr3zIn wrote:

PCI is 133MB/sec :snip:

That's in its most basic form. There's also a specification for 64 bits wide, 66 MHz PCI (i.e. 4x the data rate). PCI-X takes things even further..! The Host Controller chips manage quite comfortably to convert between high-speed serial busses (USB2/firewire) & the PCI bus.

Note that PCI-X is in fact a *serial* bus! It's far easier to get a 1-bit wide bus going really bloody fast than have 8/16/32 bits arriving at the same place at exactly the same time... It presents itself as a 'parallel' bus (but isn't really). IIRC it is also backwards compatible with PCI.

Royston

always thought that firewire is 400mbps which results in 50Mbyte/s.
8bits per byte
USB2 = 480mbps = 60 Mb/s
Firewire2= 800mbps should reach 100 Mb/s
Writing more than 40 Mb of audio data per second to hd would only be possible using many tracks / high resolutions / samplerates and a scsi or raid HD solution

all those interface specs only tell you which date rate you cannot achieve - the one beyond specs.
It does not say how much of the theoretical bandwidth is usable in practical applications
Be very careful with your expectations under various wide spread OSes, as it's depending on driver code quality and interface specs, not only on chip design.

cheers, Tom

I can at least be sure of one thing, my firewire interface transfer 18 channels IN and 18 channels OUT in 24@96 with no glitch whatsoever witha latency of 32samples...that's 3ms has gsif and multiclient asio/wdm.

tnx marcuspocus, that's exactly what I had in mind: real world data

cheers, Tom

hey marcuspocus:

is that interface a RME hammerfall?

-myth

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: mythalethe on 2004-01-02 18:33 ]</font>

No, it's a tascam fw-1884

More than a converter

maybe OT: the magma box seems to be a good concept although as of now id rather play with a rackmounted pc loaded with powerpulsars, driven by a laptop through M$ terminal server... just a thought but you'd still have a box with your cards in it and a laptop ok the laptop srceen will refresh a bit slow but wtf, you can load the dsps without worries

anybody?