[Jon.N.CNC]

Jon,

(The ultimate cam will be the first to have multicore processor support, just not happened yet.) Mastercam support in most of its paths these days the multicore support for crunching paths. What are you looking for?

I also find it funny as many in the last months keep throwing SW in arena for a CAM software. SW is a CAD software. you can add a few CAM packages to it yes.

HSM Works is a nice CAM add-on for sure. But still does not have the power and the option of Mastercam. As for Price yes Autodesk is giving it away.I will also say for the home enthusiast using a samll home routors and Mach3 this is great as the cost is nothing and the power is big.

"mastercam aspects are becoming multicore processor aware" they haven't stated that any of mastercam actually has multicore processor support. As explained in person to me in by the owner of bobcam that for toolpath generation its much like being able to share equations across multiple cores which is complex and to do it efficiently enough to increase performance is even harder. No 3D cad or cam currently does this, what is happening is they are starting to compute tasks across multiple instances as a work around to utilise more of the additional cores. A bit like opening mastercam twice generating one tool path with one and another with the other then combining the gcode file. each instance will be assigned to one core. Not actual multicore support yet but a step in the right direction. This can be done with any exe instance that exist on just one core, sw are now including this practice in their training.

Mastercam is very good, I prefer hsm pro, in inventor not sw (seems to be less fussy to me to produce successful paths) because it does everything I need it to do and I find it simple to use. Nothing much more to it than that and it's a personal preference more than anything. Would be interesting to assign two trained technicians to see who could create effective toolpaths fastest for same part using mc and hsm. If it's within the capabilities of hsm my money would be on hsm.

I will say CADCAM does have its benefit of having just one program running.

It's horses for courses really, for routing a package with inbuilt nesting capability would likely sway their vote (bobcam would be a good contender) but as of such there is no such thing as best cam.

Autodesk are giving away the basic hsm package. But it's not the real deal. One must purchase hsm pro for all of the hsm features such as spindle tilt and five axis, not many hobby users have one of these laying around! But also quite a few additional options for 3axis I found from 360 trial.