On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Miller Puckette hat gesagt: // Miller Puckette wrote:
There's a sketchy description in: http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/Publications/icmc96.ps Some of the details didn't come out as planned there but the client/server setup at least didn't change.
It's interesting to re-read section 5 "Implementation" of this 1996 paper in the light of the "renaissance" of multiprocessor systems today. ;)
Yeah, it's not really a "renaissance", it's that FTS/ISPW systems were designed as elite systems for elite musicians backed by elite budgets. When Opcode and Pd and jMax appeared, it was to bring patchers to personal computers.
On personal computers, multiprocessing never caught on because the fastest thing in the medium-price range was single-processor. This only changed at the time of the introduction of the G5 and the Pentium-D processor (which I won't abbreviate to "PD"...). At that time, the impending era of multiprocessing had been announced for well over 10 years and one can only cry wolf for so long...
At about the same time as that, though, personal computers got a heavily parallel coprocessor known as a GPU. Multithread support would be quite moot if the GPU could be used with the same level of flexibility that the CPU can. I don't know enough about GPUs to tell yet, but I guess that this is one of the next things I'll have to learn.
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