You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

Remember the time I said that Gluestick wasn’t optimized yet for 8 core systems?

So I have a new eight core Mac Pro on order, but I’m stuck in the mass GeForce 8800 GT wait. So tonight, I went to the Apple store to see the new Macbook Air, and I tried Gluestick on one of the new 8 core Mac Pros while I was there.

My primary development system is a dual core Macbook Pro 2.16 ghz, and on average Gluestick spawns 3-4 threads while idle, and 5-6 threads while busy. Pretty decent optimizations for a quad core system or dual core system.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I fired up Gluestick on a new Mac Pro and found that it had spawned 20 threads. When it was more active it spawned around 25 threads. Gluestick was running great on the new Mac Pros. Now, I wish I could take credit for this, but it would seem there is some previously unknown optimizations in OS X that Gluestick is taking advantage of that allow it to run nicely on 8 cores.