Michael Collins wrote:
Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
According the Sangoma data sheet, the Octasic part _is_ the DSP (which
it
is, in a logical sense). The board does not relieve Asterisk/Zaptel of
any
additional burden beyond echo cancellation and tone detection at this
time; Asterisk/Zaptel don't know how to take advantage of any of the
more
advanced Octasic features yet.
"Yet" being the key word. Digium is wise to take advantage of
on-board/hardware DSP where possible. Many so-called "high-end" card
manufacturers (e.g. Natural Microsystems) have DSP built right on to
their cards. As a consumer using two separate systems that use these
"high-end" cards I can tell you that there is an industry bias against
"the little guy with no DSP on his T1 card." (This bias reminds me of
the Microsoft snobbery against Linux in the late 1990's.) Some industry
players, including vendors who create apps using these high-end T1
cards, think that a Digium or Sangoma card without DSP on the card
itself is just a toy. Their thinking is like, "Well my NMS Quad T1
board costs US$15000 - it must be WAY better than a $2500 card from
Digium/Sangoma/whomever." Now that Sangoma, with Digium hot on their
heels, have T1 cards with some on-board muscle, it is getting more
difficult for the big boys to dismiss "those annoying open-source
geeks." (Just like Linux, eh?)
Cards like Dialogic and NMS actually have very little DSP processing
power on them. There are only a few CTI cards made today with any
serious processing power on them, and those are not made by the likes of
NMS, Dialogic, Pika, etc.
We've been doing host processing since 1999. Suddenly we're sexy.:-) In
the last year everyone in CTI, and a number of newcomers, have launched
HMP products. I think it was Intel who coined that term. How everyone
wants to be on the Host Media Processing bandwagon, many with rather
half baked thrown together aggolomerations of a few random DSP
functions. Seems like the industry is following us. We may need to put
some serious compute on these boards, for EC and transcoding, but most
things are working just fine on the host CPU.
And yes, when Digium's Octasic-based module starts shipping (currently
in
beta testing), it will offer the identical functionality, so I guess
we
can say our boards have 'DSP processing' too :-)
Again, a good thing to put on the sales collateral, if for no other
reason than it lets potential clients know that Digium/Asterisk can play
with the big boys. I definitely like it. On-board DSP has advantages
in higher-end applications where clients are willing to spend $, whereas
the "dumb" cards also have a wide range of applications that will fill
the needs of the budget conscious consumer.
But the high dollars don't generally get you the high processing power,
or a solid quality product (cough, Dialogic, cough).
Kudos to Digium on this one! Keep us posted on the progress - I think
this will be a quantum leap forward for the open-source telephony
community.
Steve
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