FM3 and Moore's Law

[tlainhart]

(sort of)

There's probably apples/oranges at play here, but I'm curious as to, in terms of processing power, the FM3 compares to the original Ultra, this almost 15-years later. Some miniaturization and form-factor is in play here, as well the algorithms behind the various models have probably become more resource consuming since those days making the comparison tougher, but it's a question that's drifted into mind now that I own an FM3 (and owned an Ultra, then II).

 

[mr_fender]

From the Fractal website:

I thought I remember seeing somewhere the FM3 is just above the II in terms of CPU power. Keep in mind the III and the FM3 also have separate dedicated graphics processors, so more main CPU power can be dedicated to audio. In the older units, that was handled by the main processors.

 

[FractalAudio]

The FM3 is somewhere between the AX8 and the II. Probably closer to the AX8.

The new SHARC+ DSPs aren't terribly fast. In fact they're a tiny bit slower than the previous generation SHARCs. However you get two DSP cores plus an ARM core in a single package that only consumes a couple watts. They also have dedicated FFT and FIR accelerators whereas the previous generation you could only use either-or. The pipeline in the SHARC+ is a lot longer and there's an extra cycle of instruction latency for many operations which slows things down if you don't code around it. We had to rewrite all our assembly libraries to compensate for this. Pain in the rear.

The memory bus is a little faster though and there's better caching which improves overall performance.

Still, the SHARCs pale in comparison to the Keystone DSP in the Axe-Fx III. That thing is a monster. But it also costs three times as much and needs a lot of ancillary support ICs. The net DSP cost is probably around 7-8 times higher.