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hi everybody,
i have the following problem : i have purchased a macintosh dual 1ghz(quicksilver not the noisy one) and when i enable advanced multiprocessing in cubase vst/32 r2 the system freezes, i have to switch off the mac from the tower .
This problem occurs only when i use pulsarII and it's asio drivers : creamware pulsar II ,s.f.p 3.1C.
As soon as i load a third party plugin and then enable "advanced multi processing" in vst while s.f.p. 3.1c is launched everything crashes.
if i don't enable multi processing or If i use cubase alone with the sound manager asio driver and without starting s.f.p. ,everything runs perfectly.
So i assume that the problem relies in pulsar or it's asio driver.
My specs are :
Mac dual 1ghz quicksilver
Mac os 9.2.2
nvidia geforce4 mx 64 mb
1.5 gig ram
creamware pulsar 2 sound card (soft :s.f.p. 3.1c).
i've tried all possible solutions(ram assignements, reinstall,digidesign pci extension and so on...) and i'm not the only one having this problem with a dual processor machine.
Thanks for help.

I dunno how multiprocessing is implemented in Cubase or any details about CW's Asio implementation, but possibly some general hints may explain what's happening.

To take advantage of multiple CPUs the software has to be build with a specialized library, opposed to the regular stuff.
If a programm benefits from this procedure is highly case specific, the rule of thumb that 2 CPUs = twice the performance may hold on DSPs, but rarely on native processing.
Generally 10-20% are achieved, 30-50% may already be considered a good result.
That's why some companies put efforts in this, while others stay away from mp.

You know that Apple's puts all developement efforts into OSX and wants to push this as their next standard.
Since multiprocessing is far more common under unix-flavoured OSes than in the Windows world, there's a good chance this will succeed sooner or later.
CW's drivers are certainly outdated and CW won't spend their limited developement resources on a thing without future (improvement of OS9 Asio drivers).
They have a lot of work getting SFP over to OSX and this will automatically benefit from an improved multiprocessing support in the next version of the OS.
So you'll have to keep your patience for a while, the time is not now.
But from all anouncements you can be shure that this WILL change in not too far future.

Raising cash to finance such a developement is more difficult today than it was some years ago, even for a company like Apple. They used to spent 30% of their revenues in the early 90s on that purpose, when margins were 3-5 times higher than today.

So to make a long story short: there's seems an incompatibility in the low level stuff of Cubase/CW Asio, which is not worth to repair because the OS has been symbolically burried by Apple anyway.
Unfortunately there's no smooth transition to the next OS, which is just to brandnew currently.

cheers, Tom

Hi ,
i think you're right and i understand what you mean, but i've posted this thread also on the creamware forum and somebody with a dual processor pc ,not a mac, was experiencing the same problem

Sometime ago Pulsar and MP on the PC was a definite no go and CW warned to use dual CPU mobos. If memory serves me right that was also a bios / chipset issue, but I'm not completely shure.
Then there were (at least some) dual boards reported to be usable.
The general methods of building software apply to Intel and AMD systems as well. But it's an even wider range of possibilities that something goes wrong than on Apple, due to the multitude of chipsets and bios versions.

cheers, Tom

Hi Lore, have a look at it:

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... 3&forum=19