HDX card = 3 to 7 x Accel card? Avid needs to explain.

[Pete Gates]

Originally Posted by Emcha_audio

As john stated it depends on your plugins but also your host processor power, as the hdx card is an hybrid system that can benefit from the host processor power.

The HDX card is not a hybrid, it is a pure DSP system (with a bit of supporting FPGA routing glue).

The TI processors exploit some form of pipelining - where the processor can perform certain operations in parallel. This has to be carefully coded to be exploited to maximum effect. The standard Digirack plugins have been recoded to exploit this but 3rd party manufacturers will probably take a while to fully get across it. It's not an automatic process and requires careful coding but can reap massive speed gains (and massive speed losses if incorrectly optimised which causes pipeline stalls) which may explain the rather nebulous estimates of power increase over the current TDM cards.

Pete

[meric]

Originally Posted by reichman

This is just speculation, but if you look at the videos from AES, lots of plug-in developers were talking about getting AAX running, and then optimizing their code and having it run twice as efficiently after optimization. The nice English engineer from Avid on the night of the PT10 announcement was talking about wildly variable efficiencies depending on the code. I don't expect drawing an exact comparison will be possible.

But we have any update from Waves?
I'm afraid

[mixboy bob]

This definitely needs clearing up. For the current HD3 user... it's easy: HDX1.

For those of us with an HD6, marketing is leading us to believe that an HDX1 will match that, but if reality proves that this is incorrect, the difference between a 1 and 2 card system is $7000! Rather sizable. I don't want to spend any more $$ than I have to, yet DO NOT want to step backwards in terms of processing power/routing capabilities.

peace

Rob Burrell
aka mixboy

[ggegan]

Originally Posted by Pete Gates

The HDX card is not a hybrid, it is a pure DSP system (with a bit of supporting FPGA routing glue).

The TI processors exploit some form of pipelining - where the processor can perform certain operations in parallel. This has to be carefully coded to be exploited to maximum effect. The standard Digirack plugins have been recoded to exploit this but 3rd party manufacturers will probably take a while to fully get across it. It's not an automatic process and requires careful coding but can reap massive speed gains (and massive speed losses if incorrectly optimised which causes pipeline stalls) which may explain the rather nebulous estimates of power increase over the current TDM cards.

Pete

Sounds like this could be a reasonable explanation, but could someone from Avid please give their version of what the situation is?

As much as I would like to upgrade my HD6 to something more powerful, a specification this vague is WAY too big of a question mark for me to feel comfortable purchasing HDX without a deeper understanding of what's going on. It would be like buying a car and having the salesman tell you that the engine is somewhere between 4 and 8 cylinders.

[Max Gutnik]

The HDX card is roughly 5x the power of an HD Accel card. I say roughly because in many cases it's higher. As some have speculated, there is a lot of room for optimization on the AAX DSP platform in comparison to TDM. Not only does the hardware enable more power, but the AAX architecture itself makes big strides in efficiency.

A good example of this is EQIII - We are seeing EQIII performing roughly 11x better on HDX than on TDM. Many plug-ins after optimization are hitting the 7-10x range. Some are in the 5x range and will get better as we continue to optimize.

So HDX, while being on average around 5x the power now, will likely land somewhere higher in the near future as plug-ins continue to get tuned to take advantage of the new platform.

[Emcha_audio]

Hey max could you answer me this as I posted it here

On your website it stipulates that the HDX cards uses 18 350mhz t1 dsp chips. Is it T1 as the tigershark dsp chips, or is it TI for the Texas instrument tms320c6727b chips?

[dccarson]

With PT0HD being the last version to run TDM plugins, will the HDX card with PT10HD be able to run TDM?

[Firechild]

Originally Posted by dccarson

With PT0HD being the last version to run TDM plugins, will the HDX card with PT10HD be able to run TDM?

No. TDM will be gone forever when PT11 comes.
So Plugin manufacturers hurry up with your AAX coding boys !

[ggegan]

Originally Posted by Max Gutnik

The HDX card is roughly 5x the power of an HD Accel card. I say roughly because in many cases it's higher. As some have speculated, there is a lot of room for optimization on the AAX DSP platform in comparison to TDM. Not only does the hardware enable more power, but the AAX architecture itself makes big strides in efficiency.

A good example of this is EQIII - We are seeing EQIII performing roughly 11x better on HDX than on TDM. Many plug-ins after optimization are hitting the 7-10x range. Some are in the 5x range and will get better as we continue to optimize.

So HDX, while being on average around 5x the power now, will likely land somewhere higher in the near future as plug-ins continue to get tuned to take advantage of the new platform.

Thank you for the reply, Max.

5x to 7x is perfectly acceptable to me, and I'm sure to many others as well, but 3x would be a total deal breaker.

Now, if Avid could come up with a hardware exchange program that works for us expansion chassis owners with HD6's who would like to upgrade to HDX2, maybe we can do some business.

[The golfer]

[QUOTE]As much as I would like to upgrade my HD6 to something more powerful, a specification this vague is WAY too big of a question mark for me to feel comfortable purchasing HDX without a deeper understanding of what's going on[/QUOTE

I 'm on the same boat and Gary has a good point. The only way to really know what you get with one HDX card would be to try it (with HD6 sessions) when they are available. I doubt this will be possible...