Ardour 6 ARM CPU optomization

will ardour 6 be more optomized for 64bit ARM cpus such as raspberry pi etc. I will be creating a ARM based system for audio mixing and i was wondering if Ardour will be ok to run on. I think i read in the past that Ardour right now doesnt run properly and that it had a special version that was more suitable for ARM processers.

there is no special version for any processor. we do not distribute builds for ARM. if people had patches specifically for ARM (presumably for the build system) we’d be happy to seee them.

So there is no ARM support at all. Oh I didn’t know. Is it possible to make one. I Found a post with someone who had got it working. https://community.ardour.org/node/13780

I didn’t say there was no ARM support. As an open source program we tend to think at the source code level. Ardour almost certainly builds and runs on ARM processors. The build system likely needs some tweaks. We do not do ARM builds ourselves. There is no support for the equivalent of SSE, AVX (SIMD parallel instructions) on ARM, which is important in reducing the CPU impact of metering (the most expensive operation Ardour’s own code carries out). That requires hand-written assembler. Ardour can run without it - it’s just noticeably more CPU hungry if such code is not available.

Was reading something about ARM NEON. Is that any good.
So will I get higher Cpu using when running ardour just from using arm. And also with plugins.

FWIW, Fedora provides prebuilt Ardour packages for armv4hl and aarch64. I haven’t tried them (yet) so I cannot comment on the possible CPU load.

Thanks i hope it all works out in the end.

@mrskytown: There is a link to an ARM / Raspberry Pi compatible build posted by x42 in this thread:https://community.ardour.org/node/15404
I found performance was reasonable, not dissimilar to a build I made on RPi3 (though I wouldn’t recommend that method). There is also a build of Tracktion Waveform for RPI3 which is excellent, but understandably, it’s not free. When I tried it, Ardour appeared to be a bit more CPU intensive vs Waveform, but some of that was due to confusion over ALSA / JACK buffer / period / latency etc terminology and configurations between the different applications, otherwise its probably a bit unfair to make a direct comparison anyway as it’s not really comparing like for like.

Oh ok. I hope ardour can be more optimozed to preform better. I will be creating my own production console using ARM cpus,