ProE w4 and multiprocessors 1

[treddie]

I am needing far greater speed for some recent projects of mine and am seriously looking at an 8-core machine. But I have read in a number of forums that ProE W4 does not support multi-processors. However, when I open up task manager, I find that both processors on my dual-core are near peak activity on some ProE, heavy CPU operations. When the operations complete, both cores drop way back.

So are those forum posts wrong? I REALLY need a 64-bit system and all the core power I can get, because right now, my productivity is non-existent.

 

[dgallup]

Certain operations are multi-threaded. Opening assemblies is one because it is simple to assign the opening on different models to different cores. Rendering is another and so is Mechanica. However, most of the rest is single threaded and probably will be for a long time.

Check out the benchmarks, you will see that you need the fastest processor speed, not a lot of cores. You can improve results with overclocking, etc. but not too many people are willing to do that in a work environment.

 

[treddie]

That's abysmal that PTC and Solidworks would not support that. You would think they would want to be on the cutting edge of that. Really strange. Especially since many aspects of solid modeling is so CPU intensive.

 

[dgallup]

If it were just a matter of "supporting" it they would in a heartbeat. In general, the software development tools out there are way behind the hardware. There are some program families like FEA and certain graphics operations where there are lots of similar small tasks that can easily be separated into independent routines that can run as separate processes then combined into a complete result. Unfortunately, most CAD software is more of a serial process & not easily rewritten into parallel processes.

I suspect that the first low cost multithreaded CAD program will be a completely new one that is conceived & created to run that way from the start. It is going to take the legacy programs a long time to get there. PTC will probably take longer than most because they support multiple operating systems and processor families.

We got in this position because the microprocessor suppliers finally came up against a wall in terms of clock speed but their process capability keeps shrinking so the only way for them to offer increased performance is to put more cores on one die. Unfortunately, in today's software environment the performance gain is mostly in the ad copy.

 

[treddie]

You bring up some good things there. I recently started my transition from vb6 to vb.net and got into its multi-threading capabilities. But the problem I was working on was essentially an initial value, numerical integration problem. I could use multiple threads to a small extent, but eventually, they all had to converge on a node that couldn't move forward until all the threads were finished...and that whole process had to repeat for each iteration. I saw about a 120% increase in performance, and thought I could MAYBE push it to over 150%, but that would have been optimization time. No way could I expect roughly 100% increase per thread for the whole process just by using multiple threads.