The IRCAM Workstation (1) or IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation was intended to be a realtime concert performance computer, that was not tied to huge wires or energy supplies or vast amounts of support people. It was created between 1989 and 1991 by the RealTime Group at IRCAM, Paris, in collaboration with the Ariel Corporation. It functioned as IRCAM's main system through the 90's, together with jMax and Max/MSP.
It used a Next Cube computer with three specially Ariel build audio-cards, containing each two Intel i860 CPU's with 32 MByte of RAM and a Motorola 56000 DSP for the I/O. Each card was capable of producing 400 simple table lookup oscillators, 450 bipolar recursive filters or 50 interpolating oscillators. It took 1 millisecond to get a 1024-point FFT on a single i860.
Each card provided up to 160 MFLOPS or the equivalence of a PPC 132 MHz general purpose processor.
This marks also at the same time the problem that the ISPW was facing in the upcoming years after its intitial introduction. Namely that general CPU's became more powerfull and also much cheaper to attain.
This can be at best illustrated by the fact that initially the new version would run on a multi-processor Apple clone called a Daystar Genesis MP with four 132 MHz PPC604, achieving the desired processing power of the ISPW (2).
By the time in 1997 all work on this was done, a new 300 MHz PPC604e in a PowerMac 9600 was capable of doing this with just one processor and without the normal overhead that comes along with multi-processing. When in 1993 Next stopped making computers the whole process of redesigning had to start all over again and the further development of Max/FTS was taken up, more or less resulting in the final model of client-server and implemented eventually in the shape of jMax.
The IRCAM Musical Workstation: Hardware Overview and Signal Processing Features-EricLindemann, Michel Starkier, Francois Dechelle; ICMC 90, Glasgow (1990;
New DSP applications on FTS -Francois Dechelle, Maurizio De Cecco, Enzo Maggi, Norbert Schnell; Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, Hong Kong (1996).
