I understand that neither Ardour nor Jack works (truly) with parallel processes at the moment but that some experimentation has been done with Jack and that Paul wants to move to a more parallel model some time soon…
But the question is how soon?
Realistically, if I am purchasing a pc today with the potential for another upgrade in 12-24 months, is it worth going to quad core now or would a faster clocked dual core be of more benefit?
Ardour can take advantage of (probably) up to 3 processors at present. The audio processing occurs in 1 thread, the GUI in another, and then there is disk, MIDI and OSC I/O. You will benefit from 2 processors without any doubt, and will probably see a benefit from 3. 4 is overkill for Ardour and I don’t anticipate this changing for 6-12 months.
Cool, I was looking at the Phenom II triple core as a small upgrade… Hopefully this will buy some time so that when Ardour is doing parallel processing 8 core CPU’s maybe readily available (and affordable)…