KVR Audio

Jbravo · Post by **Jbravo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 12:46 pm

I'm looking to upgrade my desktop PC with a machine which has greater processing power, but how do I know what to choose? Is quad core going to be better than dual-core even if the quoted speed is a lower figure? I'm a complete lay-man when it comes to such technicalities so any advice is appreciated! I don't need fancy inputs/outputs or graphics as I'm doing everything in the box (FLstudio)

thanks in advance

Burillo · Post by **Burillo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 12:50 pm

TFLOPS

Gamma-UT · Post by **Gamma-UT** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 1:14 pm

What's the percentage difference in clock speed between the two options?

Jbravo · Post by **Jbravo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 1:17 pm

well I don't have specific numbers to compare, I was just looking for more of a general guide

lnikj · Post by **lnikj** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 1:24 pm

You will only benefit from more cores if the applications that you choose to run are coded to make use of multiple cores.

In the case of your DAW, it appears that it is so coded:

https://support.image-line.com/knowledg ... hp?ans=476

Individual plugins may or may not use multiple cores.

For example, when Lush-101 was released it could only use one core. It was completely unusable for me. Now it has multicore support, and I barely notice its CPU usage.

If you had had a very fast processor at the time it was released then it would have been usable on the single core. It is still the case today that some plugins and apps only use a single core and therefore a faster processor will suit them better.

All in all though, with music apps, in general I would say more cores is better than faster processors if forced to choose as there is a movement towards multicore support.

Might hurt the wallet more though!

Jbravo · Post by **Jbravo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 1:34 pm

thanks for the info and explanation Inikj

Gamma-UT · Post by **Gamma-UT** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 1:35 pm

Jbravo wrote:well I don't have specific numbers to compare, I was just looking for more of a general guide

Multiply the Ghz by number of cores. If the number for one is 1.5x or more than the other, go for that one. If the difference is less, it gets trickier. At low latency settings, more gigahertz is likely to rule over number of cores. You are also more likely to be able to run high-demand instruments, such as Diva, particularly at low latencies.

At higher latencies (and this may be only 128 samples), cores win most of the time on DAWs. Check out DAWbench to see, although I don't think they've done FLStudio.

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 2:15 pm

Burillo wrote:TFLOPS

This would be my answer too.

And it covers most of the bases as well... specifically, multiple cores, as well as increased clock speed, will give you more FLOPS (floating point operations per second) in theory. They are both a part of the equation (esp in a multi threaded environment).

from the wiki:

What is more important though, between the two, I'd say is extra cores. You'll ramp your FLOPS value much higher this way. That said, this only pertains to software that is multithreaded. Most software today seems to at least be able to assign, at least, different synth instances to different cores though, but it seems few can assign a single synth instance to multiple cores (believe u-he products can do this).

You're better off getting that 2 GHz, Quad core processor (in most cases) than that 3 GHz, Dual core processor, as example.

1 socket x ( 4 cores / 1 socket ) x 2 GHz x 4 flops per cycle = 32 GFLOPS

versus

1 socket x ( 2 cores / 1 socket ) x 3 GHz x 4 flops per cycle = 24 GFLOPS

arkmabat · Post by **arkmabat** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 2:51 pm

More GHz! Especially for audio. I made the mistake of getting an old i7.

jackoo · Post by **jackoo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 3:28 pm

+1: more GHz for audio

Jbravo · Post by **Jbravo** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 3:33 pm

thanks VitaminD for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense

@arkmabat - is your old i7 particularly slow? I guess people have different ideas of what speeds are acceptable/usable

arkmabat · Post by **arkmabat** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 4:03 pm

My i7 is 4 cores @ 1.7 GHz. Not the best for single core synths like Diversion. One Celeron is better than a single core of my current setup.

arkmabat · Post by **arkmabat** » Fri Jan 30, 2015 4:10 pm

What kind of asio latency do you guys use? Maybe I have it set too quick.

Breeze · Post by **Breeze** » Sat Jan 31, 2015 1:34 pm

lnikj wrote:All in all though, with music apps, in general I would say more cores is better than faster processors if forced to choose as there is a movement towards multicore support.

Might hurt the wallet more though!

Of course, right now if money permits, you want as much of both as you can afford. Though right now, the best return on investment is getting an overclockable 6-core, some of those can give you an easy o/c @ 4.5 GHz on air cooling with fast RAM. You also get lower latencies that way.

While the industry is moving towards multi-core operation, low-latency multi-core live processing and generation of audio is proving to be a hard nut to crack. For now the fastest way to manage it is through traditional single core processing. The reason synths do better is that individual voices can be parsed out to different cores, but processing plugins are pretty much single core. And as linkj mentioned some DAWs are better than others at distributing the workload across cores.

It's going to take years, maybe decades, to really have efficient granular multi-core processing, from the hardware, to the OS, DAW and finally audio plugins, but as long as CPU clock rates can keep increasing, it'll be slow going as clock speed will still advantage the traditional model. As most things human, we generally only buckle down when we hit a wall.

mkdr · Post by **mkdr** » Fri Feb 06, 2015 11:30 pm

Breeze wrote:
lnikj wrote:All in all though, with music apps, in general I would say more cores is better than faster processors if forced to choose as there is a movement towards multicore support.

Might hurt the wallet more though!
Of course, right now if money permits, you want as much of both as you can afford. Though right now, the best return on investment is getting an overclockable 6-core, some of those can give you an easy o/c @ 4.5 GHz on air cooling with fast RAM. You also get lower latencies that way.

While the industry is moving towards multi-core operation, low-latency multi-core live processing and generation of audio is proving to be a hard nut to crack. For now the fastest way to manage it is through traditional single core processing. The reason synths do better is that individual voices can be parsed out to different cores, but processing plugins are pretty much single core. And as linkj mentioned some DAWs are better than others at distributing the workload across cores.

It's going to take years, maybe decades, to really have efficient granular multi-core processing, from the hardware, to the OS, DAW and finally audio plugins, but as long as CPU clock rates can keep increasing, it'll be slow going as clock speed will still advantage the traditional model. As most things human, we generally only buckle down when we hit a wall.

Hold your horses. We already have efficient multi-core DAW's. Reaper and Cubase(starting from 7) for example. I think you might be referring to "realtime" or very low latency performance? In that case you are partly right, it's quicker to run a single data stream with just one CPU(or core) as there won't be costly thread syncing involved.

what's more important, cores or GHz?