Does Rhino V5, V6 or any of the more popular plugins use Intel AVX?
Hi Matt,
Just curious, why is this important?
Generally, software developers don’t write code at this level. A compiler used by a developer, however, might/would generate code that uses these.
– Dale
Hi Dale. I’m reading up on overclocking my new workstation. According to a ‘How To’ for my board, one of the items that gets hosed is ‘Intel AVX’. I’ve no idea at all what is is or what it does but a quick search brings up articles about floating point calculations, so I though it best to ask here before proceeding further.
I’ve gone a bit left field with the new rig. The system disk is a Samsung SM951 nvme mounted straight into an M2 slot on the board underside. First impressions are that this is extremely quick, if a little toasty, so I’ve bonded some heatsinks to it and created some additional ducting. Monitoring software for nvme temps is a little thin on the ground…
For the CPU I’ve started out with an i3 6100, which this board seems to overclock quite well. As I do very, very little rendering related stuff these days my thinking is that two fast cores will serve me adequately. I’ll run some benchamrks (including Holomark) and report back. If it doesn’t work out the fallback is the i7 6700, but I was attracted by the low power requirements (and low cost!) of the i3. It seems to run ridiculously cool at stock clock speeds - even when busy, the pipes on my cooler heatsink are cold to the touch and the cooler fan is only just ticking over (about 650rpm) so my little Silverstone case is all but silent. Bliss 
I’m still setting up the new Rhino install so it’ll be a day or two before I get a proper feel as to whether this is a workable setup.
When it comes to CPUs, I’m in the “there is no replacement for displacement” camp…
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-6700-vs-Intel-Core-i3-6100/3515vs3511
Perhaps “there ain’t no substitute for cubic inches”, but I’m curious to know how big the gulf is betwen the two and in the case of the i3 6100, it’s a fairly cheap experiment. Those clock speeds look very similar to me, and the overclocking headroom on the 6100 looks to be greater than the i7.
In native Rhino, which commands use more than two cores simultaneously?
Primarily, multiple cores are used for tasks like rendering that lend themselves to parallel processing. Basic surface modeling is a far more serial process.
Another consideration are things like email and Web browsing.
Do you close your email client and other background tools when modeling in Rhino?