On the performance of a GPU-based SoC in a distributed spatial audio system

Abstract

Many current system-on-chip (SoC) devices are composed of low-power multicore processors combined with a small graphics accelerator (or GPU) offering a trade-off between computational capacity and low-power consumption. In this context, spatial audio methods such as wave field synthesis (WFS) can benefit from a distributed system composed of several SoCs that collaborate to tackle the high computational cost of rendering virtual sound sources. This paper aims at evaluating important aspects dealing with a distributed WFS implementation that runs over a network of Jetson Nano boards composed of embedded GPU-based SoCs: computational performance, energy efficiency, and synchronization issues. Our results show that the maximum efficiency is obtained when the WFS system operates the GPU frequency at 691.2 MHz, achieving 11 sources-per-Watt. Synchronization experiments using the NTP protocol show that the maximum initial delay of 10 ms between nodes does not prevent us from achieving high spatial sound quality.