[PD] PDDP meeting?

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 6 May 2006, Arie van Schutterhoef wrote:

> Subsequently it became possibleto this with general CPU's like PPC,
> MIPS, UltraSparc. etc., etc., etc... Intel had a lousy reputation in
> this. They later on discovered there was a market for this so up comes
> MMX, SSE...

x86-based SIMD didn't do floats until SSE1 and 3DNOW, but it doesn't
matter because jMax never used it and Miller's Pd never used it. There is
less than 1% of Pd users that use SIMD. Does MAX/MSP use SSE and/or
Altivec in its signal processing ?

> Thus if you wanted to do video use a separate processor!

Video using the DSP in jMax was not possible until Christian Klippel came
along and modified jMax. Meanwhile I designed a video plugin that used the
message system instead, called video4jmax, which by the end of the year I
had renamed to GridFlow.

> However one can question whether it was a clever thing to do this
> seperation,

I think that the client/server separation is very worthwhile. The dropouts 
are caused by not enough separation and/or by buffer-clogging.

> on the other hand with current dualcore processors becoming standard for
> the next couple of years, maybe it ought to be revived.

You must be kidding. Pd already has a separate GUI thread (wish pd.tk).  
The only advantage jMax has, is that all its GUI lives in that thread, 
whereas Pd does lots of unnecessary coupling. The amount of work left to 
make Pd cleanly client-server-separated is almost nothing.

Then there's the fact that at this point, the issue of getting audio
running fast enough, has already disappeared. If it wasn't the case, many
more people would spend time on Pd devel_0_39, which can be up to 4 times
faster than Miller's Pd (except for fft~ in which case it's even faster).  
Bringing in a second processor is thus not that useful.

> I think, by the way, IRCAM could have supported it slightly more
> decently with their lists.

What do you mean?

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada