Case Study: Desktop Imaging
Desktop Imaging on multi-core processors
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Multi-core processors present significant potential for performance gains in software applications. Since few applications today take full advantage of this new technology, there is an opportunity for software organizations to gain a competitive advantage. Those applications that are not multi-core enabled will not scale as processor vendors continue to add additional cores, in fact, those applications may get slower as the per core performance decreases.
The RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform allows software organizations to quickly build multi-core capable applications using existing practices, tools, and compilers. Whereas other techniques, such as tools for multi-threading, are difficult, time-consuming, and error prone, the RapidMind platform enables a safe, reliable, and maintainable application. Furthermore, RapidMind-enabled applications will automatically scale to additional cores and future multi-core processors and accelerators (such as GPUs or the Cell).
With desktop imaging in particular, where applications create and manipulate images and documents, RapidMind allows software organizations to quickly build these types of applications that fully leverage multi-core processors.
RapidMind has performed a number of benchmarks (detailed later in this paper) specific to imaging that demonstrates the tremendous advantage provided by the RapidMind Platform. These include:
- Photoshop Filter Plug-in, Swirl Filter: 7x speed-up on 8 cores
- Final Cut Pro Video Filter: 10x speed-up on 4 cores
- Image Processing Application: 25x speed-up on 8 cores