Hi Tomasz, I've been reading the arguments for and against multi-core support with interest, and I just wanted to add my own voice to it and mention an angle which hasn't currently been focused on.
Since I bought AmiBroker a couple of months back I've been blown away by not only what a great piece of software it is, but also by it's value and the fantastic customer support. Your own responsiveness to customer needs and ability to efficiently add new features leaves me with no hesitations in recommending AmiBroker to my fellow traders. However, I use AB in two ways. First for swing trading... for which it is not only awesome, but also works perfectly happily on one core because of the lower overhead in terms of data through put and therefore calculation overhead on that data. I also use AB for higher frequency day trading... and it's here for me that multi-core support could really add something. For obvious reasons the multi-core argument has so far been almost exclusively focused on optimization. However, for higher frequency traders like myself, working off just one core can be a significant bottleneck. I have an IQ Feed 'tick' database... and some quite complex chart setup's & indictaors. Currently, with chart refresh interval set to 2 seconds (I'd like it quikcer) I can see one core of my computer working away at about 50%. However, if I increase the update interval to zero to bring in every tick, I see useage on one core go up to 80-90%. At this point, you can imagine, AB becomes noticeably clunky and difficult to use. Things get even worse if I start to think about symbol linking. (for reference I am only looking at a couple of e-mini symbols) The frustrating aspect is that I have another 7 x 3Ghz cores sitting there twiddling their fingers while AB is grinding up on one core. So, I do think, for those of us who use AB for higher frequncy trading, there is a very good argument to consider adding multi-core support outside of the optimization argument. Love to hear your (or anyone's!) thoughts on this. Many Thanks
