Conference Paper
A Software-Centric Solution to Automotive Audio for General Purpose CPUs
AES Conference: 2019 AES INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTOMOTIVE AUDIO · Paper 11 · September 2019
Abstract
"Current automotive audio systems are in general distributed systems, both in terms of hardware and
functionality. An automotive audio system may contain several DSPs, microprocessors and general purpose
multi-core CPUs, with increasingly complex functionality split between processing cores. There are many
situations where audio signals need to be passed back and forth between cores, such as for mixing or acoustic
echo cancellation, and timing, synchronization, data formats and other discrepancies between components have
to be managed, which adds significant complexity and makes the whole system more fragile and inextensible.
Some reasons for this division of tasks are historical; in the past, specialized DSPs for audio equalization,
filtering, etc. were required to offload the main application processors, and functions such as audio chimes have
to boot-up quickly and meet more stringent safety requirements than entertainment signals. Nowadays, general
purpose multi-core CPUs (referred to here as GP CPUs), such as ARM or Intel/AMD processors, have advanced
considerably and many automotive SoCs feature GP CPUs that run at 2 GHz or more, but the DSP typically
remains below 1 GHz. Consolidating audio processing functionality on a single GP CPU with QNX Acoustics
Management Platform (AMP) reduces system cost and complexity, improves reliability, accelerates time to
market, provides standards-compliance, and brings capabilities and performance to new levels."
