[PD] puredata evolution

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> PD-list at iem.at mailing list
> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/ 
> listinfo/pd-list



------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----

If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.