Hardware RAW developing

wellman

With all the emphasis on multi-core processors lately, I've been thinking. These new crop of processors (Intel Core 2 Duo, etc) are still generic cores, able to handle lots of different tasks. Once we get up into 4 or 8 cores, wouldn't it be great if you could get one or two of those cores dedicated to RAW developing?

Alternatively, think of physics chips for gaming (or math coprocessors in the days of yore). They're chips designed for a specific task, and they do that one job much faster than a generic processor could.

Imagine your RAWs developing 100x faster than the best thing on the market today. It's possible with a dedicated chip. Who's up for purchasing one?

wellman

Just me I guess?

Rhuarc

I think this would be pretty cool as well. You could do it now if the software people would make the actual RAW processor run as a seperate thread. Actually, if you use ACR you could probably assign ACR to the second processor. I might have to try this when I get home!!

dragon300zx

The technology, similar technologies, for dedication a processor or core to one specific task in a multi processor system are already in use. However I have yet to see it in use on anything other than extreme enterprise level server solutions (I'm talking high end unisys enterprise servers) and I thought it was a great idea then (some 4 or 5 years ago when I originally saw it). Somehow I just don't see this making it down to the consumer level for several years to come at least (if ever).

Richard

Application specific processors have been around for a long time but have never gotten very far in general purpose computers. I can't get terribly excited about the idea for RAW processing. I would rather have multiple general purpose cores and lots of shared memory, then let the OS decide on the optimum assignment of threads. While I do spend a lot of time converting RAW files, I also spend a lot of time on other tasks and I would rather have all my machine resources available then as well.

Regards,

kdog

If you have four or eight core and there's not a whole lot else going on in your computer, the OS might allocate five or six of them to image processing anyway. Why limit yourself to one or two?

BTW, your computer already has a powerful image processing computer built in -- on your graphics card. The algorithms for graphics rendering and image processing are pretty much the same. It should be trivial to repurpose your graphics card to do image conversions.

Cheers,
-joel

Rhuarc

kdog wrote:

If you have four or eight core and there's not a whole lot else going on in your computer, the OS might allocate five or six of them to image processing anyway. Why limit yourself to one or two?

BTW, your computer already has a powerful image processing computer built in -- on your graphics card. The algorithms for graphics rendering and image processing are pretty much the same. It should be trivial to repurpose your graphics card to do image conversions.

Cheers,
-joel

I completely agree with this, however current software doesn't utilize the pwoer of the graphics card does it? Also, aren't graphics cards programming more suited to rendering graphics than they are manipulating pxels? When you have a high end card it can render CGI's very quickly. But when you are developing a RAW file, or doing any image manipulation it is more just pixel editing, sin't it? I wish Photoshop would take advantage of the hardware some of us have.

I want my SLI setup to work for my photos too! Come on Adobe!!

claudermilk

Now to rain on your parade: Since the camera manufacturers cannot agree on a single RAW format between them, much less within each company (each and every body is a unique file format unto itself ), that would mean you would have to purchase a new processor to go along with your new camera. Worse yet, you would need one for each and every camera body you need to convert RAW files from. Nah, I'll keep my general-purpose processors and let the OS allocate usage. With a "mere" two cores, one gets dedicated to the conversion while the other allows me to keep working on other tasks with no slowdown. Interesting idea, but I don't think it would work out in practice.

colourbox

I'm all for this. Any of this. As far as they are applicable. And by that I mean CPU speed is not the only limiting factor in image processing. Adobe has put up articles like this one and this one that provide some insight into why you sometimes can't just throw more of what you have at the machine and make things faster. It seems like there is a "gotcha" with just about every "hey, why don't they just (do this thing) and everything will be so fast!"

It sounds like what we're really asking for is entire computer systems optimized for raw and Photoshop-style processing, not just one or two components.

That said, I'm really happy with how if I tell Lightroom to do more than one thing, more of my cores spin up as needed.

wellman

claudermilk wrote:

Now to rain on your parade: Since the camera manufacturers cannot agree on a single RAW format between them, much less within each company (each and every body is a unique file format unto itself ), that would mean you would have to purchase a new processor to go along with your new camera. Worse yet, you would need one for each and every camera body you need to convert RAW files from. Nah, I'll keep my general-purpose processors and let the OS allocate usage. With a "mere" two cores, one gets dedicated to the conversion while the other allows me to keep working on other tasks with no slowdown. Interesting idea, but I don't think it would work out in practice.

And I guess Adobe isn't too likely to put their multi-camera RAW developing software on a chip, since they're a software company. Good point.