PSP & Multi Threading

[TimW]

Does anyone here know if PSP X8 & or X9 take full advantage of CPU multi cores & multi threads per core ? A Corel tech relayed to me that "multi threading was not that important for PSP" & I have a feeling that is not the whole answer. If that statement is true, then that leaves mostly CPU clock speeds to move things along. Anyone have any experience or thoughts on this ?

[LeviFiction]

No idea. The only thing I do know is that scripting in PSP is not thread safe.

[TimW]

"Scripting in PSP is not thread safe". I'm not sure what that means.

[rondo]

The more CPUs or cores a computer has, the more things it can do at once. This helps improve performance across everything you do — even if you’re just doing one thing at a time, the computer needs to perform background tasks. With a multi-core CPU, it can use other cores for such background tasks to avoid slowing your programs down.

A single physical CPU core with hyper-threading appears as two logical CPUs to an operating system. The CPU is still a single CPU, so it’s “cheating” a bit — while the operating system sees two CPUs for each core, the actual CPU hardware only has a single set of execution resources for each core. The CPU pretends it has more cores than it does, and it uses its own logic to speed up program execution. Hyper-threading allows the two logical CPU cores to share physical execution resources. This can speed things up somewhat — if one virtual CPU is stalled and waiting, the other virtual CPU can borrow its execution resources. Hyper-threading can help speed your system up, but it’s nowhere near as good as having additional cores. Main benefit if for Video Editing and 3D Rendering.

Corel is correct in their statement.

If you want to speed things up, get a fast CPU 3.2 ghz or above and new DDR4 memory.

[TimW]

Thank You rondo. A good easy to understand explanation.

[photodrawken]

Sorry, rondo, but you're pretty much wrong in your explanation -- you've confused multi-cores (a hardware configuration) with multi-threading (a software procedure).

These days, it's so easy to first check Wikipedia for a description:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computing)

Put simply, when an application is "thread safe" that means its tasks can be broken down into pieces of executing code and those pieces of executing code can operate independently of each other. Those pieces of executing code can also pass data between themselves and be much more efficient in their use of computing cycles.

The most obvious practical benefit we all see is when an application's user interface runs in a separate thread from its background processing: you can apply a filter to an image (which might take quite a while to compute), but while those computations are happening, the interface will still respond to your scrolling, zooming, etc.

So, that Corel tech was feeding you a bunch of B.S., IMO.

[TimW]

Thanks photodrawken. The muddy water is starting to clear up even more .

[photodrawken]

My apologies for that link in my previous message. Apparently, this forum software is not including the ending parenthesis in its hyperlink. So, if you get an error message from Wikipedia about the subject not being found, click on the "Thread (computing)" suggestion....

[rondo]

photodrawken-

I was not wrong as I outlined multi threading in computer architecture for hardware-
multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) or a single core in a multi-core processor to execute multiple processes or threads concurrently, appropriately supported by the operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithre ... hitecture)

You described multi threading in software- a completely different bird.

Whether or not Corel PSP uses multithreading programming in it's software design is beyond me-

Performance wise, a decent CPU, sufficient memory and using PSP in 64 bit mode is all one can do.

[flagpole]

photodrawken-

I was not wrong as I outlined multi threading in computer architecture for hardware-
multithreading is the ability of a central processing unit (CPU) or a single core in a multi-core processor to execute multiple processes or threads concurrently, appropriately supported by the operating system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multithre ... hitecture)

You described multi threading in software- a completely different bird.

Whether or not Corel PSP uses multithreading programming in it's software design is beyond me-

Performance wise, a decent CPU, sufficient memory and using PSP in 64 bit mode is all one can do.

Dude you are so factually inaccurate, misleading or irrelevant as for the distinction between it and wrong to be irrelevant.

The answer is that multi threading is being implemented on an as needed basis starting with the most CPU intensive tasks. So for example skin smoothing and time machine are. Inner bevel is not.

There's a simple test you can use for example on my quad core a non-multithreaded task will use 25% where as a multi-threaded task will use 100%.
Boost clock and things will get in the way a bit, but the principal is sound.

[Charlie77]

Hi, I am running Windows 7 on an Intel i7 4 core CPU. Each core has 2 threads for a total of 8 threads. I have Sysinternals Process Explorer installed. (A really neat free program) I fired up PSP X9 64 bit and marked 24 .NEF files to load. Checking the Process Explorer CPU graph showed all 8 threads with Corel active on them. It is my feel that PSP X9 takes full advantage of my system resources as needed.

[photodrawken]

Charlie,
Gotta be careful here with the terminology -- your i7 CPU has four physical cores, each of which is running as 2 virtual cores, not threads.

When you're loading the 24 NEF files, Process Explorer shows that Win7 is doing a great job of maximizing your system's resources. Not that PSP X9 is....

flagpole's comment is more to the point of how multi-threading can be observed. The details of exactly how multi-threading is implemented are, quite frankly, beyond my knowledge, but I believe this statement is true:
To take advantage of multi-cores, an application must be "thread-safe", and if an application is "thread-safe" it doesn't matter if a particular one of its processes happens to be using multiple cores or not, because multi-threading can occur on a single core.

To get back to the OP's question, it's very much to your advantage if your application does support multi-threading.

[rondo]

Well, I guess the references I posted from Wikipedia are wrong too- I didn't address mulit- threading in software as gratefully others have done here to answer the original question posted- forgive me for being so irrelevant and trying to help but gratefully there are several critical experts here to correct me.

Regardless of how PSP is programmed and runs, how do you get the best performance out of it- that is perhaps what the original post is interested in.

[brucet]

I'm with Rondo. I don't care about threading of any kind. All I care about is the efficient use of what I have. I suspect that good coding from the folks at Corel will make a bigger difference than the 'technicalities' of threads. As software gets more bloated the harder it becomes for coders to adjust for changes in technology.

regards

[TimW]

Interesting information posted by everyone - Thanks.