[LAD] Has anyone ever played a plugin in realtime ... [related to:] hard realtime performance synth

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Emanuel Rumpf <xbran at web.de> wrote:

> I still somehow wonder, how cheap low MHz Chips can outperform my
> GHz PC system. The answer seems to be parallelism of computations,
> which the GPUs (or DSPs) support better than CPUs.
> This also means, that faster CPUs won't necessarily bring
> the effect we are waiting for.
> (To play many software effects/instruments in an acceptable time.)

GPUs do not run a general purpose OS. CPUs do (at least if you run
Linux, Windows, BSD, OSX, Solaris etc). HUGE difference. This plays a
major role. The overall architecture of a GPU is very, very different
from a CPU, making the code that runs on them more deterministic. GPUs
also do not service interrupts from every device on your system.

> Anyway. If the PCs can't do it, someone has to create a new
> system, or extend the PC anyway to make it capable.

not all PCs can do it. but its simply not true that "PCs can't do it".