Does Max/MSP take advantage of multiprocessors?
Max/MSP doesn’t break audio tasks up and distribute them across multiple processors — if you only consider the audio part of Max/MSP, there is no additional benefit to using multiple processors. Since OS X and Windows XP are “threaded” OSs, some applications (e.g., Logic Audio) make use of multiple processors by running some application code (e.g., MIDI and UI tasks) as one thread on one processor, and audio on another processor. While Max/MSP doesn’t explicitly control how OS X distributes these threads across processors, there are some things you can do to realize some benefit from multiple processor systems. There are three parts of Max/MSP that can potentially run in their own threads. Audio code and UI tasks run in their own threads, so it is possible that OS X or XP can move the audio to the second processor while the UI remains on the first. The Max/MSP scheduler can be set so that it either runs in its own thread, or run in either the audio or UI task threads using the DSP Stat
