XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

The Sonic Core XITE hardware platform for Scope

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petal
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XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by petal »

It looks like I'm soon going to join the club of XITE owners. Some of the major reasons why I decided to make the jump is to leave the PCI-bus and the problems that comes with it (PCI-overflow etc.) and also to be able to use a laptop instead of the huge tower pc I've been using for years now.

At the moment there's only the Expresscard-option, but I expect to see other options at some point.

Are there any educated guesses out there, concerning future connection types for the XITE - is USB3 up to the task fx?


Cheers,
Thomas
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garyb
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

usb3 would probably work, and it would be convienient, but other than that it's a bad idea imo. the Scope hardware needs to be connected to the system at the lowest level possible. the pci-e bus, which is what expresscard is, it at the bottom of the process, below the os. usb sits on top of the os. for a realtime system, that makes a difference. the biggest issue might be the non hot swappable nature of the xite.

i'm not an engineer, i only have the limited understanding of a few conversations, but it think that's how it is. thunderbolt might be a bit more of a viable option, but there's not that much being saved using usb or thunderbolt over expresscard. the former are just slightly more convienient than the latter. the problems that are involved with redesigning for another format don't really seem like a good place to burn the company's limited resources. thunderbolt might be an exception since i believe it does support pci-e protocol.
petal
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by petal »

ok - thanks gary!

I can see why USB3 might not be the answer even though the bandwidth seems large enough. Thankfully I have no urgent need and can wait to buy a new laptop and would like to go mac book pro/air (no I'm not a fanboy, I just like the apple design compared to how pc design looks)
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by jksuperstar »

garyb wrote:usb3 would probably work, and it would be convienient, but other than that it's a bad idea imo. the Scope hardware needs to be connected to the system at the lowest level possible. the pci-e bus, which is what expresscard is, it at the bottom of the process, below the os. usb sits on top of the os. for a realtime system, that makes a difference. the biggest issue might be the non hot swappable nature of the xite.
That's about as good an explanation as it gets. USB3 doesn't provide any more speed than PCIe 2 does either, while PCIe also provides direct access from the device to the memory address space. USB also has more protocol overhead, since it still provides for multiple devices chained on a bus, while PCIe doesn't have any of that overhead. S|C made a good choice with PCIe.
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dante
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by dante »

For future S|C DSP hardware seems theres more of a push from the userbase on how it connects audiowise (MADI) rather than buswise to the host.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by siriusbliss »

PCIe or even Thunderbolt are the best options these days.

Greg
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by HUROLURA »

But using the Xite-1 onboard memory could lower the bandwidth need under certain circumstances. For example a reverb FX currently make use of the host memory so in case you want to add some reverb to a track from your DAW, the dry signal has to be fed to the Xite, then the xite kind of sind it back and forth to the host memory and as you probably wish to record the result, you send it back to the DAW at the end. Using the internal memory instead would save half of the bandwidth ...

This is one of the optimization point that need to be addressed though it couldn't be done with our old brave PCI cards and would mean 2 different releases of the plugs using such features ...
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

when we hire 10 more top level coders then.... :lol:

since thunderbolt is basically pci-e, it's possible that a thunderbolt connection is only a connector or simple adaptor away, i don't really know, however.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by HUROLURA »

I do not think you need 10 coders to enable onboard memory use. Only a few atoms would have to be modified for a start: the pc_delay??k ones (3 of them and probably quite similar).
Then you would need coders to make use of such features but maybe it could first be used for already available devices using such atoms.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by dawman »

It was such an achievement that Analog Devices itself was impressed, and I've heard that the Memory is no big deal, and other opinions vary, but from my experience, RAM on chip, GPU on Chip, etc. seems to have many advantages and I can't understamd why this feature gets passed over and instead uses system RAM which doesn't seem like realtime to me..

SInce I have System RAM for Kontakt Templates, it would be great to have the effects from DSP seperate, as it was the reason for me to buy DSP in the first place.
I wanted DSP power seperate from CPU. A wonderful experience.
So naturally I see RAM as a similar advantage, yet nothing I am aware of uses it...?

An explanation would be great, but even better to see the resources get used.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by jksuperstar »

+1
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garyb
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

it's not 10 coders just for the memory. it's 10 coders to get to the memory. oh! drop everything and redesign it all! well, v6 is coming...

from what i hear, it's not as big a problem solver as it seems...
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by HUROLURA »

I was just talking about DSP atoms, which shouldn't change much with Scope 6.
But I wasn't expecting anything before Scope 6...
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

sure. it's not the dsp atoms, it's the program itself.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by HUROLURA »

The atoms I was talking about are using the host RAM to provide some long delay features.
For now, they are using the host RAM for that purpose.
My suggestion was to make use of the Xite onboard RAM instead to lower the communication need with the host and the need to get through the old DSP to achieve host RAM access.
The only limit there is the 32MB available per new DSP.
This would require some internal Sdram management mecanism though...
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garyb
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

yes, i know what you meant. afaik, it's not an issue of an atom, it's a script within the program itself, which may require a more fundimental change to the whole system. using host ram isn't so much an issue of atoms as it is .sys files. also, it's not clear if making use of that ram is as beneficial as some theories might suggest. for the most part, the XITE doesn't really have bandwidth issues. if the system could make better use of onboard ram, of course that would be great!
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by HUROLURA »

I understand what you mean Gary, but this would also be one step forward towards Xite "standalone" use. :)

For me, in an ideal world, the only features that should rely on the host are GUI, setup and preset handling, but not any processing task...

By the way, using the Sdram that is directly connected to one DSP would definetly be more efficient than sending the data back and forward to the host through the other DSP...
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by petal »

I just saw that Thunderbolt has arrived for windows machines:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thu ... ,3205.html

It sure seems like Thunderbolt is going to be the best IO-option for the XITE-1, especially when it now/in the near future is supported by both Windows and OSX.
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by siriusbliss »

Intel just this week announced that over 100 products will have Thunderbolt by end of this year, with the optical version starting to arrive next year.

Greg
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Re: XITE - Connection options - will USB3 be the new thing?

Post by garyb »

actually, thunderbolt looks to be a step backwards, but it's cute. aside from the hotswapability, what's the advantage over a normal pci-e connection? for an XITE, which can't be hotswapped anyway, not much.

it's not like i'm in the way of the connection, though.
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