PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi Guys,

Q: how much power does the DSPs on the PCI boards use when SCOPE has not been loaded?

One of my machines with SCOPE boards is also my main SW development machine, which means that SCOPE on that machine may sit idle for days.
I know the boards (and the SHARCs on them are late-90's implementation, and probably had less focus on power-consumption.
But I am wondering what state they are in when SCOPE has not been initialised?

Do the boards and chips run at full speed / power consumption regardless of what software is loaded, or is there a lower power state for them when not initialised by SCOPE?

If they draw less power / make less heat when not running, I will probably have SCOPE as a "Load on-demand" option, rather than part of the start-up sequence...

To my knowledge, power consumption is correlated with DSP load. The late 90s already cared about power consumption, to increase speed and reduce colling requirements. In many cases there was no overtemp protection, so you could kill chips by not cooling enough.
Although my impression is, that a uninitialized PCI card doesn't do any DSP work, you could define an empty startup project.

The DSPs on scope don't have trouble with power or heat, so there's no need to bother.

Note: The behaviour of Xite is slightly different. Without loading any project, it sometimes sends wild things on Midi at a very high rate.

Yes the MIDI stream from Xite when the host PC sleeps is rather dense.

The DSP chips themselves are built to run in industrial and car applications, but our PCB boards are not I ensure adequate case cooling for the cards as this also protects the host system as well.