We would like to know the maximum capabilities of the new Xcore 200 chips.
The limitations of the onboard DAC on the development board are of no concern because we will be outputting via I2S direct to our own native DSD 512 and PCM 32/384 capable DAC's
Using the new Xcore 200 chip, can the audio be sent over Ethernet from a PC rather than USB 2.0 if the bandwidth exceeds USB 2.0 maximum?
What's the maximum channel count and DSD/PCM rate that can be sent to multiple cards daisy chained together with the new Xcore 200 system?
What's the max channel count and DSD/PCM rate that could be sent to multiple end points connected to a gigabit switch?
I realize the previous generation of AVB chips were based on 100mbit Ethernet, but the new chips have 1000 mbit Ethernet on board now. So does this mean that 10x the bandwidth is possible now over AVB with the new Xcore 200 vs the previous gen chips?
We would really appreciate the answers to these questions if anyone knows.
Thanks in advance
What are the DSD/PCM multichannel audio capabilities of the Topic is solved
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Mivera
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infiniteimprobability
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Quick go at answering these - sorry I don't have full answers for you and a lot of this stuff is in development but a best effort at this stage
Using the new Xcore 200 chip, can the audio be sent over Ethernet from a PC rather than USB 2.0 if the bandwidth exceeds USB 2.0 maximum?
+++ Of course. You don't mention which Ethernet protocol you want, but AVB is an abvious choice. Getting that from a (windows) PC will be interesting and require an add in card. A mac with the right ethernet interface does it natively. Not sure how many channels the host side supports - osx will probably do 64
What's the maximum channel count and DSD/PCM rate that can be sent to multiple cards daisy chained together with the new Xcore 200 system?
+++ A complex question to answer. 384KHz is already supported - 768KHz should be possibel for lower channel counts. Presumably you mean USB systems? Currently channel count is limited to 64Mbps (single isochronous endpoint) so 12 @ 192KHz @ 24b for example. High bandwidth endpoints (3 * 64Mbps) are technically feasible but have not yet been implemented. AVB should be able to reach 96 ch at 48KHz across 8 streams (under development). DSD 256 (both native and DoP) already supported via an appnote . DSD native at 512 should be doable but I'm not sure if this has been tried yet.
What's the max channel count and DSD/PCM rate that could be sent to multiple end points connected to a gigabit switch?
+++DSD over AVB is an interesting one - The IEC61883-6 standard includes support for 1b data but the support for this is not the XMOS reference design. I guess you could pipe DoP over 24b AVB data and decode it. EIther way, probably best to start with the 96ch @ 48KHz number and scale from there according to DSD rate/packing format,
I realize the previous generation of AVB chips were based on 100mbit Ethernet, but the new chips have 1000 mbit Ethernet on board now. So does this mean that 10x the bandwidth is possible now over AVB with the new Xcore 200 vs the previous gen chips?
+++No. The MAC will actually support full line rate transmit and recieve but the 1722 packetisation and audio processing downstream will now be the bottleneck. 96ch @ 48KHz over 12 streams works out at 202Mbps line rate. So thats about 2.7x the 100Mb audio throughput (75Mbps) which feels about right. It's likely a 32-core chip will be needed to handle this. This is under dev and is to be released later this year (need to work out how to support this with boards etc.)
Using the new Xcore 200 chip, can the audio be sent over Ethernet from a PC rather than USB 2.0 if the bandwidth exceeds USB 2.0 maximum?
+++ Of course. You don't mention which Ethernet protocol you want, but AVB is an abvious choice. Getting that from a (windows) PC will be interesting and require an add in card. A mac with the right ethernet interface does it natively. Not sure how many channels the host side supports - osx will probably do 64
What's the maximum channel count and DSD/PCM rate that can be sent to multiple cards daisy chained together with the new Xcore 200 system?
+++ A complex question to answer. 384KHz is already supported - 768KHz should be possibel for lower channel counts. Presumably you mean USB systems? Currently channel count is limited to 64Mbps (single isochronous endpoint) so 12 @ 192KHz @ 24b for example. High bandwidth endpoints (3 * 64Mbps) are technically feasible but have not yet been implemented. AVB should be able to reach 96 ch at 48KHz across 8 streams (under development). DSD 256 (both native and DoP) already supported via an appnote . DSD native at 512 should be doable but I'm not sure if this has been tried yet.
What's the max channel count and DSD/PCM rate that could be sent to multiple end points connected to a gigabit switch?
+++DSD over AVB is an interesting one - The IEC61883-6 standard includes support for 1b data but the support for this is not the XMOS reference design. I guess you could pipe DoP over 24b AVB data and decode it. EIther way, probably best to start with the 96ch @ 48KHz number and scale from there according to DSD rate/packing format,
I realize the previous generation of AVB chips were based on 100mbit Ethernet, but the new chips have 1000 mbit Ethernet on board now. So does this mean that 10x the bandwidth is possible now over AVB with the new Xcore 200 vs the previous gen chips?
+++No. The MAC will actually support full line rate transmit and recieve but the 1722 packetisation and audio processing downstream will now be the bottleneck. 96ch @ 48KHz over 12 streams works out at 202Mbps line rate. So thats about 2.7x the 100Mb audio throughput (75Mbps) which feels about right. It's likely a 32-core chip will be needed to handle this. This is under dev and is to be released later this year (need to work out how to support this with boards etc.)
Engineer at XMOS