Evaluating the Potential of Low Power Systems for Headphone-based Spatial Audio Applications

AbstractEmbedded architectures have been traditionally designed tailored to perform a dedicated (specialized) function, and in general feature a limited amount of processing resources as well as exhibit very low power consumption. In this line, the recent introduction of systems-on-chip (SoC) composed of low power multicore processors, combined with a small graphics accelerator (or GPU), presents a notable increment of the computational capacity while partially retaining the appealing low power consumption of embedded systems. This paper analyzes the potential of these new hardware systems to accelerate applications that integrate spatial information into an immersive audiovisual virtual environment or into video games. Concretely, our work discusses the implementation and performance evaluation of a headphone-based spatial audio application on the Jetson TK1 development kit, a board equipped with a SoC comprising a quad-core ARM processor and an NVIDIA “Kepler” GPU. Our implementations exploit the hardware parallelism of both types of architectures by carefully adapting the underlying numerical computations. The experimental results show that the accelerated application is able to move up to 300 sound sources simultaneously in real time on this platform