OpenMP is particularly awesome as it's extremely non-invasive, and quite portable. GCD is probably highly irrelevant, as it's an OSX specific service/library, which means it's only useful to OSX exclusive applications, who make a significant effort to benefit from it. Mac OS is not so much behind as it is sideways compared to GCC since the adoption of the LLVM for Xcode, the Apple IDE.Īnecdotally, I have a menu bar item that indicates core activity, and all the cores seem to be engaged whenever I export from Darktable. Yes, since Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) there is a service called 'Grand Central' (GCD - please see /library/ios/documentation/Performance.)that can distribute multithreaded software across multiple cores automagically. sometimes testing it is the only way to find out.īut seriously? MAC? Ever heard of LENOVO with ubuntu or fedora on?

You can time the overall performance of converting lets say 1000 pictures from a portable drive with specific settings, measure the time required, and go with a portable drive then to a store with the computer you want to buy on display, ask the seller to install this software and do the same test using the same portable drive. I vaguely recall our Mac porter needing to jump through a few hoops to make this work on OS X.īut beyond that I don't know exact/current details. That said, this is extra complicated on OS X, because Apple's compiler is outdated and thus only supports a uselessly outdated version of OpenMP. How efficiently this is varies per module, since some algorithms simply don't parallelize well. I am considering upgrading my old Mac to a new multi-core Mac Pro, and have been unable to find whether the Mac OS version of darktable supports multi-core processing, and if so, how many cores?ĭarktable (when built with recent/proper versions of GCC) uses OpenMP which allows most of the imaging pipeline to utilitize multiple cores.

Darktable portable