Multicore Vsts and E-Cores vs P-Cores

[Chalisque]

I don't have a new Intel CPU, but I am wondering how the heterogeneous nature of e.g. the 12900K works with DAWs and VSTs, in particular, what happens if e.g. a Diva thread is scheduled on an E-Core, (and similarly in a DAW with regards to where it schedules VSTs).

I'm thinking that an E-Core would take significantly longer to process a block vs the same code on a P-Core. Thus it is more complex to schedule things than with a homogeneous setup as you have with e.g. a 5950X.

[Urs]

That is probably true and it's probably the reason we currently can't recommend the MC option in Diva for Apple M1 CPUs.

On the positive side, at least on M1 CPUs we know that they have enough power to make multithreading less desirable, i.e. Diva performs just fine with Multicore disabled.

[Garrincha]

I have a 12900k and did a test with Repro 5 recently. With Cubase MC on and set on 8 cores still gives the best performance by far. The difference to MC off is about 100%.

Interestingly enough with Superior Drummer 3 it's different. That one performs the worst with MC set on 8 cores and best with set to 1.

Seems u-he does MC just better than the rest

[EvilDragon]

AFAIK, you can set core affinity per process on Windows, so your DAW would only work with P-cores (if you know which core is which in numerical order).

[Garrincha]

AFAIK, you can set core affinity per process on Windows, so your DAW would only work with P-cores (if you know which core is which in numerical order).

Yep you can do that, but from my experience I wouldn't recommend it as you are in fact loosing performance. Cubase makes good use of the E-Cores so it's save to actually use them.

Windows 11 does the automatic distribution of processing between P- and E-Cores pretty good, so I'd recommend leaving it at that.