Hey people,
Now intel released their new CPU generation (8th). They come with six cores.
So I wonder if that is even important for our purpose? I made the experience that at least the speed makes a significant difference in performance. But has a 4core CPU with the same speed as a 2core CPU an advantage? I talk about average performance.
What is your experience? Does an upgrade to a 6core CPU make any sense?
And btw: how does AMDs ryzen perform in our application?
Thanks!
Best,
Chris
I’ve been having some strange experiences with performance and cores. It seems to be only on a particular song at the moment (and I’m yet to test on a different machine to see if that makes a difference).
A song will be in good shape when I start it (or reset the audio engine) hovering around 30%. Then it’ll spike up to 80% and often stay there. Now that’s with 4 cores running. If I set C3 to only use 3 cores then I never get that spike.
The way I understand it, for software like Cantabile and VSTs it’s theoretically best to have a single core running as fast as you can get. It’s just not really fundamentally a multitasking kind of operation, unless you can get different VSTs running simultaneously in different cores. But of course that’s not how the architectures of new CPUs work, all the speed comes from parallel processing in multiple cores.
4 cores vs. 2 at the same speed is an advantage, I assume, in that at least part of the time multitasking can occur, even if it’s just background OS tasks running parallel to the main application.
I’m basically talking out my butt on this though so hopefully someone who really knows what they’re talking about will come along and set the record straight. 
Has anyone questioned your breath lately? 
This question is nearly impossible to answer because “it depends”.
Cantabile runs most efficiently on one core - because it spends less time coordinating and managing the other threads.
But… one core will often be slower because everything needs to be done in serial (compared to multi-thread where plugins can be processed in parallel).
Now throw in plugins that are also running multi-core mode and possibly competing with Cantabile for core access and things get even more complex.
There are too many factors involved here to say what impact it will have for sure but in general:
(“should” being the operative word).
Brad
Can I assume all of you have turned off core parking? That made a huge difference when I use my DAW so I let all 4 run at full speed when doing anything with music apps.
Thom
Yes. definitely 
post must be 20 characters blah blah blah there.
Hey guys,
thanks for the great thread. Some said: It depends.
I want to play live a virtual piano (like Ravenscroft oder some Kontakt 5 like Piano In Blue) with really low latency. I want to hear the sound immediatly, like when I am playing a standard stage piano.
I am just building a 1HE Rack-DAW for that.
Asus Prime H310i, SSD, 8GB DDR4 RAM.
As CPU I was thinking about Intel G5600 and i3-8100.
2-Core @3,9Ghz vs. 4-Core @3,6Ghz and different amount of cache.
Price is similar.
I startet with the G5600 because it is generating less heat.
I tested Presonus Firestudio Project, Esi Maya44 PCIe, Internal Sound, Zoom UAC-2.
I could set the highest sample rates (like 96khz or 192khz where possible) and smallest buffer-size (64 or even 32 @zoom uac) and could play single notes and chords without problems - fast and clean.
However, everytime I hold the pedal and repeat cluster chords I get pops/crackles.
And only when I relax the settings to a point where the latency gets uncomfortable and noticable, those pops/crackles are absent.
Will more cores in the CPU and maybe less GHZ help me here?
Or is it maybe about L1,L2,L3 cache?
I’ve been using different computer configurations over the years for live vst hosting and found that the best performance was with more cores/threads and ram. Example… i have a good friend that is a composer and he bought a 2.2Ghz 8 core with 32 gigs of ram and he just upgraded to a 12 core the end of last year. I thought as the gamers think, that the faster core/s will assure me the best performance… Not always so. The reason he was able to hold out so long was because his 8 core had 16 threads, meaning 16 lines of communication from the processor aka to multitask. Threads are like having a multi lane highway to handle traffic congestion. I used a Muse Receptor (Vst player) since 2005 and they used a modified LINUX OS and a 3.8 i7 quad 4 with 16G of ram. Did a pretty good job up to about 10 vst’s at one time. So I had an idea and built a 8 core 3.4Ghz , 32g of ram and using Cantabile been able to monitor cpu performance and has been great!! I have been able to host so far 14 vst’s at one time. I normally have all of the main volume controls of each vst mapped to my midi controller so i can adjust on the fly. So my experience is that I dont need the fastest water cooled Intel and the largest ssd to meet my performance goals. I think i run my machines harder than most musicians on a live situation and 14 has been the more than enough on all of my gigs. Oh, one I almost forgot, all ssd’s are not equal in data read/write transfer speed. I also opted for a M2 NVME drive as my C drive and a Sata 3 for my D/ sample data drive with great results. The M2 drives in most cases have a faster transfer rate than the Sata 3’s…being Sata 3 average 600m/b a second and the NVME’s average around 1-4 gigs a second. Also using 2 drives, one drive to hold your OS and programs and the second to hold the samples and data will help program load times and overall performance. So just to say dont get caught in the hype of having the fastest MAC Pro or the biggest fastest PC because you could just be wasting money. Oh and the programs i’m running for example are Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2.5, Trillian, RMX; Ravenscroft 275; GSi Vb3; Komplete 9; Akai Vip; Auturia;8dio,Ableton 9, REason 10, Cubase 8.5 and more and only using 2 M2 256G ssd’s! And still have about 30Gigs free!! It makes a difference in deleting junk off your drives!! Just my experience…