Utilizing Intel® AVX with Cakewalk SONAR X1

This is a whitepaper which I co-authored with Intel engineer Rajshree Chabukswar, highlighting the advantages of optimizing for the Intel AVX chipset, with a focus on digital audio processing in a modern DAW like SONAR X1.

We’re excited with our synergetic relationship with Intel, which allows us to take  advantage of their bleeding edge technology in ways that directly beneft our users, allowing them to squeeze the most power out of their systems. While the paper is technical and requires an understanding of some low level programming, it also offers insight into the nuts and bolts of whats involved in optimizations for Intel CPU architectures in a modern DAW.

The paper features a real world case study of SONAR X1 code that was optimized in to take advantage of the benefits of the 256 bit AVX instruction set. If you have an Intel CPU from the Sandy Bridge processor family, it supports AVX and SONAR X1 will take advantage of it.
(While AVX is an Intel instruction set, it has also been adopted by AMD will be available in their upcoming Bulldozer processors. )

Code which is optimized for AVX  vectorization capabilities can work with 256-bit vectors, allowing working on 8 32-bit floating point values per iteration. In other words, this is twice the data throughput of earlier SSE instruction set! While this doesn’t necessarily translate to twice as fast, it is a huge step up in performance in many cases as the white paper illustrates.

The first step in any optimization task is what is referred to as “hotspot analysis”. In this phase you identify the bottlenecks in the code or that would benefit most from AVX optimization. We did analysis running through stress test projects and workflows that showed some classic hotspots. Once these were identified, the code was AVX optimized using the new AVX intrinsics available in Visual Studio 2010.

Click below to read the paper or download the PDF from Intel’s site:
Utilizing Intel® AVX with Cakewalk SONAR X1

[ Additional credits to Keith Albright and Bob Currie from Cakewalk, for hotspot analysis, development, and troubleshooting ]

New Cakewalk SONAR ad in magazines and on our website

MSDN Channel 9 recently conducted a video interview with myself and Carl Jacobson (Marketing) where we discussed Cakewalk’s experiences porting to Vista, and the future of music technology. Here a link to the interview.

An article about Windows Vista from Keyboard Magazine that includes some quotes.

http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/the-vista-from/Apr-07/27456

As part of my job at Cakewalk, I’ve been working on making our applications support this new operating system from Microsoft. Some things have been easy and some not. Interestingly the stuff that ended up being the hardest to do were features that looked relatively simple on the surface. I’ll elaborate on some of this in future threads.

Here are some interviews that got published recently, where I discuss some of the work we’ve done with SONAR for Windows Vista.

Vista for Music + Pro Audio: Exclusive Under the Hood with Cakewalk’s CTO [Create Digital Music]
Interview with Noel Borthwick, Cakewalk CTO [CakewalkNet]
Why Vista Matters To Developers [EWeek]