PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I'm afraid that in a few years there won't be available any boards with PCI. Think about the history of the ISA bus.
So I won't expect a significant better performance with PCIe, but all of us and all new users who buy a new PC without PCI and cannot use their beloved Scopes? What a terrible thought!

well Herr Voigt, it looks like I'm gonna order a Supermicro P4 board with ISA slot next week to eventually reactivate my HardSid Quattro together with Scope

you can still by a ton of industrial stuff with ISA and PCI, there is no reason to change it.
If you have to order 10k boards for a specific solution, you will not pay one single Euro extra for speed you don't need. Let alone trade reduced reliability for more heat.
Not all the market is overclockers and gamers.... and DAWs are not even 1%

cheers, Tom

Vista and PCI-e cards, preferrably with new sharcs.
other wishes are for Santa Claus for the time being

Gary, they could start with classic PCI cards as PCI is still common and will last another decay (edit: as Astro already said -completely surprising ).
But if SC still has the intention to support OSX in the near future (I still think they will) then it's better to make a card which fits both platforms already from start.
With or without new sharcs

hubird, i agree, no question.

I vote for PCIe, but if they do that they need sharc tiger of course.
For scope 5 a sysex implementation. And it will be great to make crossgrade of hardware like digidesign do.

<Shroomz> wrote:I agree with Kylie & my brother. I haven't voted though, because the poll options make no sense to me at all.

me neither. couldn't decide what's most important for me anyway.

(and I didn't read "scope and tripledat for linux", and well, that's ok, since it seems to be even more unrealistic than the other stuff )

-greetings, markus-

But TigerSharcs aren't code compatible with the older chips, right? Isn't there another AD chip that's really fast but is backwards compatible? Then SC will have less hassle of porting all the old stuff over to a new system. Or am I wrong?

Shayne

Well... I don't see a post like this as "barking suggestion". It seems to me more something like "faithful customers feedback".
As I already wrote, I think that the point may sound like: "Creamware died just because they didn't address to the kids."
I hate to talk so hard, since I don't know the real terms of the story and I'm not an old and experienced user of this forum, but this is a point that our beloved platform is still missing at all.
I mean, look at stuff like a digi003 (002, 001 etc.): it looks pretty cool & it runs ProTools ("I know the X band uses this software!" ). Great, but it costs around the same price as a scope professional with a half of the features. But a kid will buy a digi 003 instead of a scope because it's cool.
And, IMHO, that's something on which every company should deal.

Sorry for the long post.

the repeating TigerSharc mentioning is complete rubbish.
You can use any DSP, be it Analog Devices, Motorola or Texas Instruments to code audio - as you could with any CPU.
Just because the TS has a high number crunching rate doesn't make it particulary well suited for audio purpose.
TS code is as different from Sharc code as M56K afaik.

SonicCore will probably use something like the AD 21375 which has 4 times the clockrate of the current chips, but has SIMD processing - single instruction multiple data, which is almost doubling the performance.
I'd estimate a 1 to 6 performance increase at similiar hardware costs.

Nevertheless it is a significant amount of work to adjust current DSP code to the new chips, as AD tells in their White Papers.

cheers, Tom

astroman wrote:the repeating TigerSharc mentioning is complete rubbish.
You can use any DSP, be it Analog Devices, Motorola or Texas Instruments to code audio - as you could with any CPU.
Just because the TS has a high number crunching rate doesn't make it particulary well suited for audio purpose.
TS code is as different from Sharc code as M56K afaik.

OK Tom, i think the point people (myself included) was that a new PCI-e card must have some form of newer processing power to attract new customers, whether it be Tigers or whatever - like most i assumed there would be some code backward compatibilty - you obviously have the knowledge, we don't. In the end it doesn't matter what the technology is, just as long as it's more powerful. If SonicCore launch the same cards but in PCI-e i don't think that will generate much new revenue - some computers can't even take the 14 DSP boards. To have equal or more power than 14 DSPs on a Pulsar2 sized card would be great.

As the poll cannot be edited take the TigerSharc option as More powerful DSPs.

pistoguitar wrote:Well... I don't see a post like this as "barking suggestion".

Well, it was me who made that comment, although I wasn't referring to this thread in general. I was talking about some peoples' attitude towards what they seem to forget is a small professional audio company.

I might have worded it rather harshly but that doesn't change the fact that people have been making (ok not always barking) outrageous demands at Creamware for several years.... the ongoing whining, moaning & yes even barking about Creamware need to do X or they need to Y or they must do Z very soon ... bla bla bla. If you substitute the X, Y & Z with OSX support, Linux support & a rush job on a new Vista-ready PCIe platfrom, there probably would be no company still there to talk about.

Now, the new SonicCore team bought CW's IP & took over operations in Germany less than a year ago. So, given that they would've needed some sort of settling in period, that they've been continuing to support Scope in various ways, that they've been developing the new Solaris hardware synth with John Bowen, that they've undoubtedly either started or been continuing other developments, what exactly do you think is a realistic timescale for an eventual new PCIe Scope platform if such a thing is to become a reality?

Sorry for ranting a bit, but there's people who come here to PlanetZ that I'm sure think that a new Plaform should've been released yesterday & they do bark about it & say things like "they better get their act together or we won't be here much longer". I'm affraid I personally think that's totally rediculous & unrealistic. Some of you wouldn't believe the time that gets put into making just one relatively simple plugin, never mind the serious plugs that Creamware made in the past. A small company needs time (& plenty of it) to develope a new pro audio dsp platform.

Shayne White wrote:But TigerSharcs aren't code compatible with the older chips, right? Isn't there another AD chip that's really fast but is backwards compatible? Then SC will have less hassle of porting all the old stuff over to a new system. Or am I wrong?

Shayne

yes exactly!
I`ve read there is a code compatible chip with similar architecture from AD, which seems to be some sort of successor to the SHARC on the scope boards.

From what I`ve read its almost code compatible to the old one, but to take full advantage of the better processing power, the code has to be optimized, maybe even by hand.

This chip is much cheaper than the tigerSharc which is relative expensive.
Creamware seemed to use this chip in their ASB Boxes.

If such a single chip can calculate a polyphony minimax or prodyssey, it seems pretty powerful already and cost-wise its fine too.

I guess an asb uses exactly one of these newer chips and you get 12 voice prodyssey out of it
A 6-DSP Pulsar card can load 9 Voices of Prodyssey.

1new chip->12voices prodyssey.
6 old chips->9 voices prodyssey

So I guess the new chip is almost roughly 8 times faster than the old one if used with optimized code.

If soniccore would use maybe 4 or 6 of these chips on a PCI-e board, I guess it would be pretty powerful platform and not too expensive to develop.

The difficult part will be to rework nearly every single DSP atom and make it run faster on the new platform, else the performance gain may be much smaller.

The optimizations could be done step by step maybe to make the development-release time shorter.

A second step would be to rewrite some critical atoms to be fully antialiased(modules in modular and sdk), or go the other way and take a higher sampling rate for internal processing of the complete platform(not only single atoms), which quickly eats up the power of the new chips. :9
a jump to 192khz can divide the power by factor 4.
But greatly reduce aliasing with non-band-limited oscillators and in other areas, which will be great to make everything sound a bit smoother and even more analog.

One thing should be clear, cascading the new boards with the old one will be almost impossible from my technical understanding.

If there comes a new card layout, the most important part personally for me, would be the modular architecture and the availibility of the sdk, as this is what makes the platform what it is.
If it will be a booster card just running some plug-ins I may loose the intrest and just use the more flexible old platform.

If some devices (like STS, and the older synths) fall out through the limited development time, I think that wouldn`be a big probelm, if there will come new and better device stuff in the future.

So my ranking for a new card feature list is:
1) modularity /atomic structure of the old system
2) open free sdk to attrack developers and users with free devices
3) good copy protection to secure pro-developers trust in the platform (some sort of compile to sharc machine/assemler code)
4) the high class synth have to be ported
5) and the most useful fx (delays, EQs, etc.) - maybe some can be even improved internally

[quote="<Shroomz>" Sorry for ranting a bit,quote]

You don't have to justify at all. You're expressing your point of view as we all do, and I believe in a really correct way.
I agree that somebody just take their right to express an opinion on a product for moaning about that product. It's a matter of education most of the times.
Furthemore, since we're not dealing with a big multinational corporation, it's easy to start behaving like a "big family".

I'm not complaining about what SC is doing or has done in its brief past(BTW, I've had a really pleasant and satisfying e-mail exchange with their customer support in the past weeks).
I was just thinking that a more aggressive marketing strategy could improve their popularity, and therefore their incomes.

As someone has told before, the BIG market isn't about professional DAWs for expert engineers who will spend a day in getting their scope system working fine because it DO SOUND LIKE ANYTHING ELSE!
The big market is incarnated by kids who love garage band because its so f****ing easy and they can put their "songs" on their myspaces with a click and enjoy their friends enthusiasm.
Why don't try to make them buy some kind of SFP LE?

Mr Arkadin wrote:...OK Tom, i think the point people (myself included) was that a new PCI-e card must have some form of newer processing power to attract new customers, whether it be Tigers or whatever ...
As the poll cannot be edited take the TigerSharc option as More powerful DSPs.

sorry, my rant wasn't directed at the poll content, as I even missed there was a TS choice... I preferred to not add something obvious or even to preach to the converted. Imho those folks know pretty well what they are doing, what they can afford and where they wanna get

I should have quoted the sentence ... if they do that they need sharc tiger of course... that triggered just an '...omg not again...' as it has been mentioned (and answered) so many times already .

that any new hardware design will of course use modern Sharcs is a natural matter of fact, probably the old ones are even more expensive today...
The new Solaris hardware already has a handful of AD2137x on board which is a pretty obvious choice, if you look at Analog Devices public catalog - I'm not telling a big secret here.

But as you can see, there's no need to point them anywhere - they've already checked it as 'passed'
and they probably didn't hire one of the core DSP developers from the old team just for being good friends ...

cheers, Tom

exactly.

if these guys do things the way they used to back in the good old days(if), then they'll likely pay attention to what the users are asking for. they won't and can't speak to what exactly will happen in what period of time. as i said though, back in the old days(v1-v3), things generally got handled, though not always as fast as we wanted(within reason for the most part). the first insolvancy changed that as coding had to be outsourced since the court released most(all) of the programmers.

now that those programmers are in charge again, we'll see what happens. my guess is that they will, as usual, quietly work at implementing what the users want and need to the best of their abilities and within as reasonable a time frame as possible. if not, then , oh well. there's no telling how it will go at this point.

hi

thanks for this specification garyb
i hope they can give us some great devices at first (new vdat stereo; rhodes; trpledat or whatever they can)
new driver,optimization of scope software, and if possible a better and workin xtc;
at the end, what was blocked 3/4 years ago from insolvency problems
i needn't a new card i would like have the maximum from what i have
(4 cards here 15/15/6/3 ;a16ultra ;luna box) creamware is a great idea and a wonderfull tool for make any kind of musica.
ciao a tutti

For me, all of these in the numbered order:
(why only a choice?)

2 XTC mode enhanced
1 Pci-e card
6 new sfp enviroment
3 xtc and sfp mixed mode
4 new devices
5 Tiger sharc chips

erminardi wrote:For me, all of these in the numbered order:
(why only a choice?)

2 XTC mode enhanced
1 Pci-e card
6 new sfp enviroment
3 xtc and sfp mixed mode
4 new devices
5 Tiger sharc chips

Sssh, didn't you read the thread? Don't mention TigerSharcs or you face the wrath of Tom

Ooooops!
Sometimes I don't have so many time to read all the tread...

Obviuosly I'm with Tom regard the Tiger Shark.

Seems to me like the new Solaris hardware synth is the stepping stone when you consider all of the new atoms & modules that it must require.