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Originally Posted by Fredrik  Id second that, I suspect that the number one reason a company goes that route today is to protect against piracy. There are benchmarks on the apogee site comparing a TDM based DSP card with a mac pro and the mac kills the that card in terms of power. |
And it'll only get worse. Intel and AMD are working on new microprocessor cores that
can contain special processing core dedicated to specialized processing. AMD Torrenza and Fusion add Hyptertransport enabled co-processing services and Fusion is a CPU/GPU hybrid.
DSP chips simply aren't keeping up with the microprocessor design. Later this year we'll see volume production of Intel's 45nm Penryn (Core2 shrink) microprocessor followed by Nehalem next year which is much faster in key areas. The next year after that you'll see 32nm parts called Westmere and 4 years from now you'll have yet another new core called Gesher. Each step will bring more cores, larger caches, faster busses and new core technologies.
If in 5 years native processing systems aren't the most powerful systems out I'll eat a bug. Right now hardware boxes are just dongles.