[Dream] DSP vs CPU (Was Timestretch)

[andrei.henry at utoronto.ca]

> The new Intel chips (and even the Opteron chips) pack 
> alot more punch than an Accel card. 

absolutely... but the intel or AMD has to manage disk access, memory, OS,
video, network, and all the programs running (forground and background) as
well as your sound app.

computers aren't truly multitasking - they do a little work on one thread,
kick it out, load another thread and work on it, kick it out and reload -
thousands or millions of times per second.  all that loading and unloading
has overhead which takes away from processing power available for the "main
tasks" (like generating noise, or applying a time-stretching algorithm). 

the accel card is 100 times less powerful - but it only does 1/200th the
work (number entirely made up...)

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