Re: Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor with SONAR Platinum
2016/03/11 19:00:53
(permalink)
No it doesn't help Sonar. Like a GPU using CUDA or anything else of the type, a program has to be specifically developed to use it. Don't be confused by the Xeon name, it has little to do with Intel's CPUs. Sonar only runs on CPUs, it doesn't use any stream coprocessors.
As a practical matter, there's little reason for Sonar to use something like that as the engine itself is never really going to get overloaded on a modern system. Mixing and routing audio is a trivial task for today's CPUs. In the highly unlikely event you were running out of CPU time for that, the answer would be to buy a bigger CPU, not to use a coprocessor.
Most people, if they run out of power at all, are likely to run out on plugins. Well, a coprocessor won't help those unless they are coded to support it, which none are. So having Sonar use it wouldn't help even the people who run a heavy plugin loadout and run out of CPU time since the plugins would still be loaded on the CPU.
Plus it might even cause more problems for running low latency, which is generally where people run in to trouble. Since data has to be sent out to that unit, processed, and then sent back to the CPU there's added latency which could be non-trivial when you are talking only a couple milliseconds of buffer on audio.
Also things like this are only good at certain kinds of processing. They are what are known as stream processors. They work well at doing the same kind of operation lots of times on lots of parallel data. Works well for graphics because that's what you do with graphics. Not necessarily the case for audio. Some things could probably be accelerated with a stream processor, but other things couldn't. They are not fast at general purpose calculations like a CPU.
Basically the answer for audio processing is get a bigger CPU. If you've gotten the biggest CPU you can afford and still have problems, get a system that has a second CPU (or 4 or 8 CPUs).