DSP hardware for number crunching? - Page 2

jasong · 2011-08-08, 05:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by jasonp

There is no free lunch.

First, everyone notice the one-letter difference in the name, jasonp doesn't have multiple personality disorder by responding to his own post. Anyhoo.

I 100% disagree about TANSTAAFL. While EXPECTING to find a free lunch is a really bad idea, so is completely dismissing the possibility. I apologize if this is seen as trying to intentionally make things go off-topic, but there's this little thing called Moore's Law, which I view as very obvious proof that sometimes free lunches very much exist.

The fool believes in his heart that he is wise, but the wise man knows that he(the wise man) is a fool. Humility is by far the most important quality someone seeking new wisdom will most benefit from.

davieddy · 2011-08-08, 11:02

Quote:

Originally Posted by jasong

First, everyone notice the one-letter difference in the name, jasonp doesn't have multiple personality disorder by responding to his own post.

[sarcasm]
And there was I thinking that you were the same person.
Your posting style is so similar.
Why isn't your name in red?
[/sarcasm]

To engage in "defending the indefensible" for a minute, I guess
that if you told someone 50 years ago (Mr Moore excepted?)
what a PC would cost, and what it could do in 2011,
he might have thought it as laughable as a "free lunch".
But I don't see how the "No free lunch" principle is
violated here: someone pays somewhere somehow!

David

jasonp · 2011-08-08, 11:53

The free lunch refers to the perpetual quest to find hardware that's cheaper than a PC yet faster at performing an LL test. You can buy a starter kit with a signal processor and some RAM and IO for a few tens of dollars, or a nicer DSP kit like bsquared linked to for a few hundred dollars, but if it could truly crunch numbers faster than Intel's or AMD's latest, why on earth wouldn't your motherboard have one? Because the whole world somehow doesn't know that Texas Instruments and Analog Devices have been making DSPs for 20 years or more? Because Microsoft is too busy being evil?

GPUs are a different story, but the OP wasn't asking about GPUs. A DSP is designed for a different job than you expect: run 100 lines of single precision floating point code as fast as possible, given a tiny power budget and an expected per-unit cost lower than the socket a PC is plugged into. High-end DSPs are delightful to program, and can manage incredible performance given those constraints (check out TI's C6x line of DSPs, they're 8-way VLIW processors with 5 delay slots on every branch), but it's not the same as 'I need a chip that can test Mxxxxxxx in minimum time'.

ldesnogu · 2011-08-08, 18:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by jasonp

The free lunch refers to the perpetual quest to find hardware that's cheaper than a PC yet faster at performing an LL test. You can buy a starter kit with a signal processor and some RAM and IO for a few tens of dollars, or a nicer DSP kit like bsquared linked to for a few hundred dollars, but if it could truly crunch numbers faster than Intel's or AMD's latest, why on earth wouldn't your motherboard have one? Because the whole world somehow doesn't know that Texas Instruments and Analog Devices have been making DSPs for 20 years or more? Because Microsoft is too busy being evil?

You don't mean to say that if any computing device was faster and cheaper than an x86 chip at LL then it would be included in anyone PC, do you?

All joke aside, it's very likely that most PC have some sort of DSP, they're just hidden in sound chipsets, sound cards and WiFi/3G chips. And you don't want to run anything on them.

Christenson · 2011-08-09, 01:11

Free lunches DO have to be paid for...either by the search for the free lunch, or by their infrequency....

I have no doubt that the fastest way to an LL test right now is a GPU, and these things are probably pretty similar to DSPs. The question in my mind was if the power cost would be interesting if there were a large number of units available cheaply, once. Remember it takes years to find the next mersenne prime right now...and if I can get in some extra LL tests over the next year for less electricity than my PC and GPU will use, AND the hardware is cheap, that's possibly interesting.

But I just don't see all of these factors converging....

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2011-08-08, 11:53	#14
jasonp Tribal Bullet Oct 2004 5×23×31 Posts	The free lunch refers to the perpetual quest to find hardware that's cheaper than a PC yet faster at performing an LL test. You can buy a starter kit with a signal processor and some RAM and IO for a few tens of dollars, or a nicer DSP kit like bsquared linked to for a few hundred dollars, but if it could truly crunch numbers faster than Intel's or AMD's latest, why on earth wouldn't your motherboard have one? Because the whole world somehow doesn't know that Texas Instruments and Analog Devices have been making DSPs for 20 years or more? Because Microsoft is too busy being evil? GPUs are a different story, but the OP wasn't asking about GPUs. A DSP is designed for a different job than you expect: run 100 lines of single precision floating point code as fast as possible, given a tiny power budget and an expected per-unit cost lower than the socket a PC is plugged into. High-end DSPs are delightful to program, and can manage incredible performance given those constraints (check out TI's C6x line of DSPs, they're 8-way VLIW processors with 5 delay slots on every branch), but it's not the same as 'I need a chip that can test Mxxxxxxx in minimum time'.

2011-08-09, 01:11	#16
Christenson Dec 2010 Monticello 5·359 Posts	Free lunches DO have to be paid for...either by the search for the free lunch, or by their infrequency.... I have no doubt that the fastest way to an LL test right now is a GPU, and these things are probably pretty similar to DSPs. The question in my mind was if the power cost would be interesting if there were a large number of units available cheaply, once. Remember it takes years to find the next mersenne prime right now...and if I can get in some extra LL tests over the next year for less electricity than my PC and GPU will use, AND the hardware is cheap, that's possibly interesting. But I just don't see all of these factors converging....