Vogone 2 sputters on AMD K6/K62 processors

[admin]

The K6 family has 1/4 the floating-point computational power of other processors at the same clock speed.

The AMD K6 processors use a 1-pipeline floating point processor. All other processors (Intel-Celeron or Pentium, AMD-Duron or Athelon) use a 4-pipeline floating point processor.

All computations in Vogone 2 are done in floating point. Thus, the hardware "pipelines" for floating point computations are very important. Fewer means less computations per second can be done, reducing how fast we can compute the sound.

What does it sound like when the sound does not compute live It sputters as blocks of samples come out of the pipeline and then play.

We are evaluating Vogone to see if we can recompile to allow using single pipeline processing without loosing performance. This is like turning the car around and going in reverse. We need more compute power, not less! More filters will do a better job than less. Don't worry, we won't reduce the number of filters or the quality. However, it is worth trying to make Vogone 2 work on the K6.

In the heat of developing a new technology, one does not always consider the lowest processor limitations to run on. We are guilty. So, now that we know this problem exists, we are addressing it.