[PD] CPU saving strategies

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Sun Aug 8 20:15:50 CEST 2010


On Sat, 7 Aug 2010, Michal Seta wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:
>>> The separation from Backend and GUI Frontend in PD is leaving a bit to
>>> desire and my question if its possible to solve this, in maybe 10 years or
>>> so?
>> I haven't met anyone willing to address that problem, ever.
> Besides you?

I did make an elaborate attempt to move the GUI's server code to the 
client side, but it was not directly for reasons of avoiding dropouts. My 
code probably could have been a basis for an easier control of dropouts 
related to GUIs, but I just didn't explicitly work on reducing dropouts.

> To be fair, I think that Tim Blechman was, wasn't he?

AFAIR, Grill & Blechmann worked on reducing the CPU usage of Pd through 
SIMD and FFTW3. Both modifications were rejected by Miller. Both of those 
help reducing dropouts and latency indirectly, simply to the extent that 
using the CPU more efficiently can achieve that. Blechmann also made a 
threading external for the message-system.

> Or maybe I have wrong recollection.  Isn't that the reason he branched 
> off with his Nada or Nova, or whatever it was called, project?

Grill, Blechmann and Zmölnig had branched devel_0_37 and later devel_0_39, 
and when too few elements of devel_0_39 were merged back into vanilla, 
Blechmann decided to leave and started PNPD ("PNPD is Not Pure Data", 
recursive acronym), and this is by no means a "branch" or "fork" of 
anything at all.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801


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