Exploiting Multi-Core Architectures for Fast Modular Synthesis

www.soundpaint.org Recently, CPU speed increases only slowly, while the number of transistors per chip keeps growing exponentially. Consequently, processors with multi-core architectures are pervading the market. Un-fortunately, most existing software still can not ex-ploit the parallelism. Since modular software syn-thesis implementations typically simulate parallel hardware, they are designated to run on parallel hardware. We examine different approaches for par-allelization of a modular software synthesizer and discuss their advantages and disadvantages with re-spect to both the performance gain and the impact on the software architecture. Keywords modular synthesis, multi-core architectures, paral