Does anyone know of a DSP that is cheap and has 8+ inputs (8 I2s mics) and that can perform beam forming calculations? I'm super new to circuit design so preferably one thats beginner friendly.

Thanks

edit: We are students who were kind of thrown onto this project for a class with little prior experience and one of the requirements is more than 8 microphones.

Details on our actual school project: This is a sponsored senior design project, where a professor and one of his PhD students asked us to build a large (8+) microphone array that can be worn on a person's body. This array would collect data and store it in some data storage device that our sponsors can later access and run algorithms on. How we accomplish this was left open. The larger the array the better, our budget is unknown but likely $100-200 range.

For our class we have to add additional requirements so we decided to attempt to use the data collected and run a beamforming algorithm on it to amplify noise in a particular direction relative to the person wearing the device. Essentially our demo would be someone wearing the device and pointing it at different sound sources and hearing the amplified audio through headphones.

Essentially for the class we need to demo the device well but also build the device in such a way that our sponsors could use it for their own purposes after the class is over.

We all have some 300 level DSP knowledge but it is all "textbook" knowledge and no hands-on hardware knowledge so we are attempting to learn it as we go.

So far we have a microphone picked out here (ofc this can be changed) and are attempting to determine what DSP to use so that we can play additional parts of the device such as how we are going to transfer data to the headphones and data storage. It is also important to have some hardware component in the project which is why Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's are discouraged generally.