Axe 3, you say? TigerSHARCs are phased out without replacement, it seems

[iaresee]

I thought tiger sharks are whats in the current fractals

 

[Rex]

I thought tiger sharks are whats in the current fractals

Nope. They're too big and heavy and wet.

 

[Dan Hill]

I want a Fractal product so powerful it needs to be water cooled.

 

[Tahoebrian5]

Some eccentric millionaire should buy up every last one. This will force accelerated development of the AXE 3

 

[Robboman]

Everybody relax.

Considering the source, methinks too many of you skated right by this key comment. IMO It means more than those two words.

I bet it means Axe III hardware platform is well into development and it's going to be great.

Of course that's not the sort of thing they can disclose yet, so we have to wink and accept two word statements like this.

Lots of chips out there. Code is portable.

 

[Disconnector]

Considering the source, methinks too many of you skated right by this key comment. IMO It means more than those two words.

I bet it means Axe III hardware platform is well into development and it's going to be great.

Of course that's not the sort of thing they can disclose yet, so we have to wink and accept two word statements like this.

Lots of chips out there. Code is portable.

TL;DR - DSP != general purpose CPUs

While I'm not a Fractal dev I do spend more than a little time behind an IDE. So I can't speak to the development of AF3 (although I think we should take Cliff's word here) but I can speak a bit to coding.

The type of code that runs on a Tigershark (or any DSP) is NOT portable. This isn't like AMD versus Intel - this is more like English braille versus written Cyrillic. The code is written for very specific hardware optimizations that the platform provides - this way we get stupid low latency yet killer high quality output. Running the Fractal algorithms on different hardware is a non-trivial exercise. I'm sure Cliff is thinking this through as he and his team creates the Fractal plugins but the core code of an AF can't just be cut and pasted to some other system.

Personally I could care less - I think Fractal has the right sound *now*. Cliff can and will continue to tweak the amps and add effects and new amps (like the HK 250ML ;-) ) but frankly we are already there folks. With Q7 I stopped tweaking and started playing.

Disconnector

 

[Guitarboy]

Can Fractal buy the rights and make new TigerSHARC DSPs with perfect integration with Quantum OS and code, the same way than Apple have A10 ARM processor?

I mean, I guess that TigerSHARC where a very small production... impossible to find any device with TigerSHARC than some boards for bench work or... axefx...
So why not buy the licence for Fractal exclusive production made by... Texas Instrument or TSMC?

I want my Lamborghini AxeFX 3 with full power!!!!!
Not an Ax8 Rack...

 

[Rex]

Can Fractal buy the rights and make new TigerSHARC DSPs with perfect integration with Quantum OS and code, the same way than Apple have A10 ARM processor?

I mean, I guess that TigerSHARC where a very small production... impossible to find any device with TigerSHARC than some boards for bench work or... axefx...
Tool So why not buy the licence for Fractal exclusive production made by... Texas Instrument or TSMC?

I want my Lamborghini AxeFX 3 with full power!!!!!
Not an Ax8 Rack...

It's very expensive to tool up a factory to produce a chip. Unless you're proposing that Fractal get into the semiconductor business—which would require that they hire way more people than they have now and invest millions in production facilities, which would be way outside their core business—footing the bill for another company to tool up would be wickedly expensive.

TigerSHARCs are older technology that's been on the market for many years. I'm sure that a future Axe II follow-on won't depend on them.

 

[offrhodes]

Can Fractal buy the rights and make new TigerSHARC DSPs with ...

It's about as realistic as founding my own nation just because I'm p*ssed off at the postal service. The effort alone for the production testing of such a part is mind-boggling.

NVIDIA is starting to sell compact GPU-like things as general purpose chip but it's nowhere as nice as the standard DSP. Having dabbled a bit (actually quite a bit) in openCL, it's "simple" problems like taking the sum or maximum of a vector that make you want to tear your eyes out ("reduction").

My guess to the future architecture is some high-end Intel notebook CPU, possibly a ready-made module, and SSE intrinsics for selected routines. With the latter, I managed speedups up to 3x in my own float DSP code, which isn't too bad for 4xSIMD - it really works.

 

[Disconnector]

It's very expensive to tool up a factory to produce a chip. Unless you're proposing that Fractal get into the semiconductor business—which would require that they hire way more people than they have now and invest millions in production facilities, which would be way outside their core business—footing the bill for another company to tool up would be wickedly expensive.

TigerSHARCs are older technology that's been on the market for many years. I'm sure that a future Axe II follow-on won't depend on them.

You misspelled "billions" there Rex. Millions won't get you into the fab game - the last fab Intel built cost $8.5 BILLION dollars. And that's not counting R&D, operating costs, circuit layout, etc. Check out https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/how-intel-makes-a-chip

 

[Rex]

You misspelled "billions" there Rex. Millions won't get you into the fab game - the last fab Intel built cost $8.5 BILLION dollars.

Yeah, well, my knowledge is old there. The last time I was in a cleanroom was 35 years ago.

 

[iaresee]

Please let this thread die. Please?

 

[Winther]

I am not getting why you believe military would be the biggest taker of a chip becoming obsolete? If you ever tried designing advanced systems you would know that military grade components are:
a) Excellent because because they always come with ten years of guaranteed stock.
b) Awful because the technology is outdated.
None of which can be applied to the Sharc.

 

[Winther]

TL;DR - DSP != general purpose CPUs.

The type of code that runs on a Tigershark (or any DSP) is NOT portable. This isn't like AMD versus Intel - this is more like English braille versus written Cyrillic. The code is written for very specific hardware optimizations that the platform provides - this way we get stupid low latency yet killer high quality output. Running the Fractal algorithms on different hardware is a non-trivial exercise. I'm sure Cliff is thinking this through as he and his team creates the Fractal plugins but the core code of an AF can't just be cut and pasted to some other system.

Disconnector

The code is not (easily) portable to a general purpose CPU and nobody - with some insight - are suggesting that. The fact is that there's much stronger DSP's available today so even if the transfer is a massive task I am sure it will be worth it and the work is probably well underway.

If you look for 'fastest DSP' you will see i.e. c6678 from Texas Instruments which doesn't only have a way higher MACS count per core than the TigerSHARC but comes with up to eight cores at ~$200.

Technology has surpassed the TS and like the admin said earlier; no need to worry.

 

[ChristThePhone]

Like desktop CPUs powerful DSPs have left the realm of passive cooling. For embedded solutions it looks like ARM is the way to go.

 

[Admin M@]

Some eccentric millionaire should buy up every last one.

I wouldn't call Cliff eccentric.