We've covered GPU Audio, Anukari and sonicLAB on Sonicstate before, so it's interesting to bring these developers together to discuss the future of Audio. MusicRadar spoke to various people within the companies to discuss their path to using GPUs, how the tech actually works, and what the future might hold for the accelerated audio of the future. There is mention of live machine learning, low latency AI processing and potential for embedded GPUs in music hardware - which on the face of it, sounds pretty exciting. 

 

GPU Audio released their long-awaited SDK earlier this year, which you can get here. 

 

Anukari announced their beta release not long ago. 

 

Here's an excerpt:

 

Now, rather than relying just on more transistors, we can take advantage of smarter architecture and workload distribution. "By offloading demanding audio tasks to the GPU," Markus says, "GPU Audio unlocks high-throughput, real-time processing that significantly outperforms conventional CPU-bound workflows."

Evan at Anukari puts it this way: "Insofar as audio processing can translate transistor count into 'audio goodness,' this just means that to take full advantage of what modern processors have to offer, the GPU is becoming increasingly attractive. But it's not always so easy to turn more transistors into audio goodness."

But isn't this difficult to do? "Yes and no," answers Evan when asked if it's difficult to get the GPU to process audio. "The GPU is very, very different from the CPU, and to take full advantage of its power requires a different approach to how a plugin's DSP code is written."

"Graphics cards were not designed to process audio," points out Chris at GPU Audio, which has put in about 10 years of R&D on its tech. "They are designed to continually pump out an insane amount of pixels across your computer screen. When you're not playing games, or rendering complex images, your GPU does next to nothing. Imagine what could be done with all of the unused resources."

 

We spoke to GPU Audio at ADC late last year:

 

 

 

Read the full article on MuscRadar: here
 

 

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