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Are Digital Signal Processors Going Away?
Paul Beckmann - Watch Now - EOC 2025 - Duration: 40:47
There is an ongoing narrative that specialized DSP processors are being replaced by general purpose processors. This presentation examines the core architectural principles that set DSPs apart and provide speed and efficiency advantages over general purpose processors. We compare benchmarks across commercially available processors and discuss emerging trends and innovations that could shape the next generation of DSP technology.
There are more and more "multimodal" applications which leverage both audio and video information. Consider a video conferencing application where the device sits in the middle of a table. The microphones would give a rough indication of where the talker is. Then the camera would turn and face the talker and visual cues would be used to fine tune the camera angle. Many applications like this exist even in automotive.
Dsp vs fpga vs gpu?
FPGAs and GPUs can be good for specialized computation. There are some commercial mic arrays that use over 100 microphones and you need specialized processing to receive and process all of these signals. The processing for beamformer is consistent and can be parallelized and implemented by FPGAs. (Plus the FPGAs help to aggregate all of the I/O.)
It is possible to do audio processing on GPUs but the price point makes it unsuitable for any high volume applications.
Dsp vs fpga? Digital comm vs audia?
What about Multimedia chips / Is it always going to be just audio/sound or is there a case for visual sensations (flashing lights, video) or vibrating seats or SurroundSmell ? What is UX in consumer applications ?