[labawi]

Assuming your samples are of duration T, and you need X CPU time to fully process a sample through all filters. Pipelining allows you to process audio with X > T, nearly X = N * T for N cores, but your latency is still going to be X.

If it is possible to process with small samples (T), with roughly correspondingly small processing time (X), there shouldn't be a problem keeping the latency small with pipelining. If filters depend on future data (lookahead), it is plausible reducing T might not be possible. Otherwise, it should be mostly a problem of weak software design and lots of legacy software and platforms.

[kitchenkarma]

You cannot run the pipeline in parallel. Sure you can have a pipeline and work the buffers on separate cores, but the process is serial. If it was as simple as you think it would have been solved years ago. There are really bright heads working in this multi billion industry and they can't figure that out. Probably because that involves predicting the future.