We recently had a customer ask us this question:

I’m currently building a new machine for running RapidWorks, and we will have a great deal of scanning data to process, taken from very large objects requiring the merge of dozens of scans. We need to find a sweet spot between cost and performance, and it would help if I had a better understanding of its threading performance. I’ve been extremely disappointed by some of the CAD software I’ve been using, having completely single-threaded routines for most CPU-intensive tasks. I’m curious about RapidWorks — how well does it split tasks into threads? If it doesn’t divide processing into threads very well, I’d be better off getting a very fast dual-core processor (e.g. 3Ghz+). If it does, I’d spend less on a more modest (2.4Ghz+) quad core and get much better performance. What’s your recommendation?

And here’s the answer from one of our developers:

1. Rapidform & RapidWorks support multithreading for some but not all operations. Rapidform XOR and RapidWorks use the Parasolid kernel for most CAD operations, so there are limitations on employing multi-threaded calculation for CAD modeling.
2. But for mesh operations, we harness multi-core/thread calculations in our most exhausting operations like Align, Merge and Deviation calculations. And also some basic functionalities and rendering operations are compatible with multi-threading.

So we recommend that you use multi-core system for handling heavy scan data.

Note : Our multithreading currently only supports dual-core. Even if you’re using quad-core or more, we don’t guarantee significant performance improvement.

It’s also worth mentioning here that 64 bit versions of XOS, XOR and RapidWorks are currently available (and 64 bit XOV will be released late Q3 2008).