That is a tough problem. On a basic level, Pd is ready right now for
two processors since it uses two separate processes: pd and pd-gui.
But the pd process does the heavy lifting, so it's a bit uneven.
As for taking advantage of multiple cores, that is a lot more
complicated. Max/MSP does have some support for threading
("Overdrive" mode), but it seems to me that it is a hack. It does
work, but it often leads to programs that are very hard to debug
since it is difficult to handle the non-determinancy of the situation.
.hc
On May 29, 2007, at 1:32 PM, Phil Stone wrote:
This has been a fascinating thread about the direction of PD.
I've been thinking about parallelism and PD as multi-core processors become common. How hard would it be to make PD able to take advantage of parallel architecture? I'm guessing that it is decidedly non-trivial, as lack of threading is already an issue in contention between the GUI and audio processing.
Without some support for parallelism, PD could be going as fast as it will ever go -- the trend seems to be that CPU speeds will not be climbing much (at least not dramatically like they have until now),
and increasing numbers of cores will be the path to greater speed and
power.Is there any hope in this direction?
Phil Stone
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