When it comes to cab-impulses or reverb, indeed it needs massive performance. I've read a lot about DSC (digital signal controllers) - but they just have simple filterblocks and are not suiteable for a complex effect unit.
Octave sounds interesting, as I don't wanna support Matlab (wrote them a request for pricing 3 month ago and never got an answer - they don't wanna get my money
).
www.r-project.org shall be a replacement for Matlab as well. Have to have a closer look at both of them
The advantage of DSPs is flotingpoint operations, memory extensions, as well as anti-aliasing. I plan to have at least 24bit 96kHz - so I'm not sure if there is any ARM that's fast enough for this.
Sure, I won't start at those high rates. At the beginning I'm happy is I can pass a signal from input to output, no matter which resolution
Even if it's not easy to get used to program a DSP, I'm willing to learn this. In an ADI world (ADAU-DSPs) there's SigmaStudio which makes the basic setup quite easy. But additional, custom filters need to be creates using Matlab (I hope the free tools might be suitable as well!).
Have you guys been playin' around with DSPs?