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How good of a DMM or Oscope could you make with modern CPU or GPU ?
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switchabl:

--- Quote from: MathWizard on July 22, 2022, 04:59:13 am ---All my Siglent stuff can be plugged into the PC, but it's a long ways from if Siglent said, lets make a scope/DMM/PSU/AWG/etc , all in one box like a PC, with a big screen, and KB/mouse, and full GUI, for those that want more than command line stuff.

--- End quote ---

That sounds a lot like the NI VirtualBench. But that is really a niche product, aimed mostly at the educational market. I am pretty sure most engineers still prefer dedicated instruments with knobs and buttons to one big screen + mouse for bench use.

ATE is a different story but that is why PXI(e) systems exists (essentially a chassis with a built-in PC and any number of instrument modules connected through PCIe).

Also, based on previous experience with PC-based test equipment, the cynic in me wants to say that the answer to the original question is: a big, loud, expensive one that always wants to install some Windows updates.
artag:
Kind of offtopic, but one aspect of pc-driven oscilloscopes is their poor update rate. Standalone instruments make the number of waveforms/second a major feature, both because it gives a better visual imitation of an analogue oscilloscope and because it influences the trigger  / rearm timing.

You can achieve equivalent trigger performance internally  and update the screen at a communications-limited rate. The dat can often be sent to the PC compressed, but consider that most PCs have either hardware acceleration for mpeg-encoded data or very effective software (including GPU) decoders.

Why not make use of this capability and send the data as mpeg ? The images on a scope screen are very simple compared with a full-colour real-lifge image and I'm assuming they'll encode correspondingly fast.
 
nctnico:
Turn that thought around: just like dealing with MPEG, a GPU can also build a scope screen from acquired data really fast. The 'trick' is to get the data into the GPU. What basically is needed is a way to feed the acquired data from the ADC into the GPU memory through PCI express.
ebastler:
Well, and the acquisition system must comprise not just the ADC and a memory buffer, but the trigger logic as well. As pointed out by others above, deciding in real time when to store and display data is the Achilles heel of a purely CPU based design.
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