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a clever way of isolating several of the CPU cores using a special version of Linux and stopping these cores from being interrupted. One core is left to run the desk communications and housekeeping whilst the rest of the cores concentrate on audio DSP for the highest channel count, without the need for buffering and the consequential audio latency.

High end “Commercial off-the-shelf” (COTS) server

boards are now available for the Intel E5 series processors. Two E5 processors may be fitted; each processor has 10 physical cores. Each physical core can run two threads or virtual cores thus doubling the processing capacity. Studer has achieved some 25 fully equipped (high quality EQ, Dynamics, Insert, Pan and fader) audio channels of processing on each virtual core, thus offering some 50 channels (mono equivalent) per hardware core; a dual processor board can thus process well over 800 channels even allowing one core for control and housekeeping. Clearly having developed this technology, the scalability offers both expansion of channel counts as processors with more cores become available (72 core processor chips are on the horizon) and the possibility of modest channel counts on basic COTS hardware for smaller mixers.

More channels for the same money or enough

channels for less money. The final part of this new concept is the need to

provide a suitable audio interface system to connect the huge number of audio channels into and out of this new core. Studer has designed a new high capacity digital audio interface called A-Link. This fibre based audio interface uses a 3Gb data rate to offer 1536 audio channels per connection. A new PCI express card has been designed to fit into the COTS server board discussed above. This card is fitted with 12 A-Link interfaces capable of over 10,000 inputs and 10,000 outputs offering the huge I/O interface counts required of this new processing engine.

We believe this new Infinity DSP engine will prove

to be a significant milestone in the development of digital audio consoles and become a standard in the years ahead. We now have 800+ channels in 5ru consuming 600w in this DSP engine. In comparison with the DSP of the mid 80’s, as discussed at the start of this article, we now process twenty times the number of channels in a sixteenth of the space using one tenth of the power. That’s progress! 

Credits: Written by Andrew Hills, Product Director STUDER Professional Audio GmbH. Regensdorf, January.2014

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