Ardour Digital Audio Workstation Finally Exploiting Intel/AMD FMA For More Performance

The Ardour open-source, cross-platform digital audio workstation rung in 2021 by mainlining support for using Intel/AMD FMA functionality for greater performance.

FMA3 has been supported by CPUs for years going back to AMD Piledriver and Intel Haswell for fused multiply-add. Now in 2021, Ardour is supporting optional usage of FMA on capable processors. The initial use-case for FMA in Ardour is for the multiply accumulate operations within audio channel mixing. The initial code was found to indeed reduce the number of CPU instructions as a result during the channel mixing.

This Intel/AMD FMA support in Ardour comes just a few months after seeing more AVX work within the open-source DAW as well.

Here's to hoping that 2021 is the year of finally seeing more open-source projects aggressively supporting the latest CPU instruction set extensions and other performance optimizations...