Hyperthreading? is it ever coming?

[djstedman]

Just curious.. I work in an aerospace shop.. I currently use Mastercam X3 for lots of 4 and 5 axis toolpathing of solid models..

 

One toolpath im working on now is a rotary fourth axis toolpath with 1 drive surface and 24 check surfaces .. its currently taking around an hour to regenerate the toolpath for this operation.

 

I am fairly patient and can generally put up with waiting for toolpaths to be generated.. however.. ughh.. this one is killing me..

 

Anyhow.. that being said.. I know im stuck waiting.. however.. whats really driving me nuts.. is that I have a quad core PC .. and need to watch 75% of my machine sit and do nothing while MCX is only running on 1 processor.. (well or more correctly spread over the four but only using 25%)..

 

Does anyone know if there is ANY plans to make a hyperthreaded version of Mastercam which would take advantage of the four cores in my computer?

[Guest]

Hypterthreading is OLD technology.

 

It was created for the older P4 CPUs, these were typically a "true" single core that could split off to handle 2 tasks simultaneously.

 

You are looking it sounds like "multi core" support.

 

At this moment it does not, I am hearing it is coming but there are no certainties obviously until released

[Mjölnir]

quote:

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Does anyone know if there is ANY plans to make a hyperthreaded version of Mastercam which would take advantage of the four cores in my computer?

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You mean making Mastercam a multi-threaded application.

 

Rumor has it it is being considered.

 

Caveat emptor. History has a tendency to repeat itself. CNC Software will likely be the last of the major players in the market to finally implement and get it right.

[bogusmill]

Hyperthreading is back in the new i7 Intel processors. Thats right, it thinks it has 8 cores. But since MC is still not a multi-threaded app it doesn't help, however having a PC with an i7 CPU should be faster than most Core 2 Quad's.

 

If you have an overclocked (4Ghz or so) C2Q with 12Mb cache, 1600 FSB and X3 MU1 installed on Vista Ultimate x64 with 4Gb or more RAM, your going as fast as MC will go for now.

[bryan314]

I hear Visual Studio 2010/.Net 4.0 is supposed to have increase support for parallel programming. Maybe after those are released.

 

Bryan

[bogusmill]

I am interested to see if parallel computing with the GPU will speed up toolpath creation. Like multithreading the application has to be written to make use of it and if MC does go that way think about a GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI or tri-SLI setup.

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

quote:

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If you have an overclocked (4Ghz or so) C2Q with 12Mb cache, 1600 FSB and X3 MU1 installed on Vista Ultimate x64 with 4Gb or more RAM, your going as fast as MC will go for now.

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That's me! Unfortunately most of my work is 2+1/2 axis.

 

quote:

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I am interested to see if parallel computing with the GPU will speed up toolpath creation.

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It would, but don't expect to see it. "Folding @ Home", a massively parallel distributed processing program for analyzing proteins, runs at least an order of magnitude faster on my GPU than on my CPU, but they wrote specific code for Nvidia cores and another version for ATI cores. It takes advantage of the array processing that's inherent in the GPU cores. To do that with a toolpath algorithm you'd probably have to completely rethink your approach, and then it wouldn't be CPU-only compatible.

 

On the bright side I've been told to expect SOME of Mastercams toolpaths to use multiple cores in X4.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Intel just released a great product to help with many core programming...

 

www.intel.com/go/parallel/

 

Looks like it could be interesting...

[Redfire427]

Expect nothing in the next release of Mastercam and this way you won't be disappointed.

[silky_johnson]

I've used Hypermill before which is multi-threaded and supports multi-processor, and it kinda spoils you. Yeah the speed is cool but the fact that you can simulate a toolpath, create geometry and set-up the next tool path all while the last tool path is calculating is AWESOME!

[BernieT]

HELLO bryan314 !!!!

 

Good to see you here again !!!!

 

 

[BritishTurbo]

You WILL see multi core support in the next version of Mastercam... They already have it working on HST toolpaths... Works very well.