PCI-Express cards

zvenx wrote: but does lynx have active plans to release a pci-express audio card anytime soon?

Yes I would like to know this as well....

Sorry, but we don't talk about future plans or products, so I can only say 'no comment'. 

I will tell you that I think it was a really dumb move for Apple to not put any PCI or PCI/X slots on the new G5.  Since there are no PCIe audio cards (or any other type of card, except for maybe a RAID controller) available, what can anyone use that computer for?  I'm sure it will run Photoshop really nicely (which is all Apple cares about).

David, my take is a bit different as an end user.

From at least two years ago, everyone knew PCI and PCI-X was dead...on
the PC side almost all professional motherboards (that is server etc and
those that video/audio etc professionals would use) came with more and
more PCI-E slots and less and less PCI/PCI-X slots.......so for me at least
it was very disheartening to see that although PCI's death was imminent
and obvious to me, that NO DAW accessory manufacturer created PCI-E
cards.....
I also believe a year from now professional PC's wouldn't have PCI slots
on them either.....
I see it as a wake up call to those who create peripherals to finally get
PCI-E cards available...Digidesign has announced their plans to do so......
hopefully others are not that far behind.

my 0.02 cents.

rsp

still a GREAT/die hard lover of lynxstudios stuff.....

zvenx wrote: From at least two years ago, everyone knew PCI and PCI-X was dead...

Disagree. Everyone knew that PCI and PCI-X would be dead someday, but as this was kind of a future vision many people spent their money on PCI cards. And, looking at the mass market, this hasn't been a problem yet and it won't be for the next two years. So why did Apple decide to disabuse their customers? It is just because they don't care for their customers. Instead they just care for themselves being visionary guys.

...and to be sure, a PCIe version of any of our audio cards would have no extra 'throughput' just because it was PCIe.  They are all running Bus Master now anyway.  The only difference is they would plug into a PCIe slot instead of a PCI or PCI/X slot. 

As for no cards being available - yes I know there are video cards - but then PCIeX16 has been replacing AGP for quite some time (some with better success than others - I might add!).

Well, an audio card is a real-time device.  Meaning it only produces a data rate at the sample rate, bit-depth and number of channels currently selected.  Since even the AES16 at 16 channels in and out (32 channels) times 32-bits times 192kHz is way under the bandwidth of PCI, why would one need to do more?  Of course if you run multiple cards in a single system, that will use up more bus bandwidth. 

4 cards (that is 128 channels) at 192kHz is 98MB/second and will probably saturate the current PCI bus.  Of course you still need to process that data and send it to/from a hard disk.  I doubt any current PC would be able to keep up with that even if the bus speed were higher.  (OK, I know, HiDef SDI video is pretty high bandwidth too...)

David A Hoatson wrote: Well, an audio card is a real-time device.  Meaning it only produces a data rate at the sample rate, bit-depth and number of channels currently selected.  Since even the AES16 at 16 channels in and out (32 channels) times 32-bits times 192kHz is way under the bandwidth of PCI, why would one need to do more?  Of course if you run multiple cards in a single system, that will use up more bus bandwidth.  4 cards (that is 128 channels) at 192kHz is 98MB/second and will probably saturate the current PCI bus.  Of course you still need to process that data and send it to/from a hard disk.  I doubt any current PC would be able to keep up with that even if the bus speed were higher.  (OK, I know, HiDef SDI video is pretty high bandwidth too...)

That’s fine if the audio card (or more of them) is all you’re running on the PCI bus. But for most people this isn’t the case as the majority of us are also running some DSP cards, and not just one but two, three, four of them… With that in mind the situation changes considerably, the bandwidth gets eaten pretty quickly and, even worse, with multiple devices created by different manufacturers with different drivers that need to co-exist on the same, highly saturated bus, there are bound to be some problems. I bet 90% of the issues people are reporting using multiple DSP cards on the same bus with the audio card would go away if they could relocate either the audio card or DSP cards to another bus. Which is, IMHO, THE most important thing PCI Express has brought along for us audio people, more important than sheer bandwidth. With PCI Express we can now have a bus dedicated solely to the audio card(s), a privilege reserved so far only for video cards. Surely that is a good thing, no? Leads to more stability which means less support calls for you plus I’m sure a lot of your existing users would be buying PCI-e versions of your cards once they decided to go for a new PCI-e enabled system which means more profit for you. Everybody wins.

hi, I didn't get the impression that they not coming out with a pci-e card,
maybe they weren't ready as yet and the apple announcement forced their
hand.

hopefully.. :-)

rsp

sorry,
I took "Its clear that no time soon will lynx be releasing any PCI-e
revisions of their cards. its a shame..... " and said it the wrong way..

my apologies.
rsp