dennisrford

I did some looking around a few weeks ago and my speculation is that the 500 dsp runs at 333MHz with 2.0 GFLOPS and the 500X runs at 400 MHz with 2.4 GFLOPS. http://line6.com/support/topic/1493-hd500x-dsp-limit/

That's an interesting idea. If they don't make something like that, a HD500(X) user could just get an M9 or something like that if expanded capability is needed.

I think the HD500X is a work of engineering genius. Their goal seems to have been to maximize flexibility and the quality of the models--which is what most users would probably prefer. They could have cut corners on the spring reverb and other models in case someone wanted to put 8 of them in their signal chain, but they didn't. They could have disallowed dual amps to keep the dsp utilzation down, but they didn't. They could have made other compromises to avoid the dsp limit, but they didn't. I think they made the right engineering decisions. Having said that, I don't know if I'll get one. I had an HD500 for a while and didn't really bond with it.

If you feel adventurous, you could open it up and identify what dsp chip is in there. That way, we'll know how much more powerful it is.

Here's the guy who identified the dsp inside the HD500: http://forum.musicradar.com/showthread.php?68920-Info-on-POD-HD-v-POD-XT-X3-and-Axe-FX-DSP-chips fwiw, I beleive there is an error in his chart. The 333 GHz should be rated, I think, at 2.0 GFLOPS (billion floating point operations per second) instead of 2.4. The 2.4 rating is for the 400MHz version. I'm just speculating about the clockspeed of the HD500X based on the dsp limits people are reaching that suggest something like a 20% increase in dsp capacity. If line 6 just used a newer, faster version of the dsp chip then they probably wouldn't need to change the motherboard and software. It may be that Analog Devices stopped making the 333MHz version so line 6 had to change. I have no direct experience with dsp chips, but if they can be compared with CPUs in PCs, then I'll say this: The increase in speed seems to be due to a higher mulitplier (12 instead of 10, or 6 instead of 5). If the multiplier is locked in these chips, then you're probably out of luck in trying to make the HD500 run at a higher speed. There's still no guarantee that a 333MHz rated chip will even run at 400MHz.

Here's a link to the relevant Analog Devices page: http://www.analog.com/en/processors-dsp/sharc/products/index.html?gclid=CIPehIvKtbgCFUlp7Aodc1oAxw#SHARC_Processors I've read that the HD 500 has a SHARC ADSP-21369 @333MHz. The same proc now shows a clock speed of 400MHz. A 20% increase. Maybe that's the whole story.