KVR Audio

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Sun Sep 15, 2013 10:03 pm

The new Xeon E5-2600 V2 series was officially announced and released this past week at the Intel IDF.

Seems they are now already available at some retailers:

PROVANTAGE: Intel BX80635E52697V2 Xeon E5-2697 LGA2011 2.7GHZ 30MB Boxed

This is (theoretically) the CPU in the new Mac Pro.

Have any Wintel system builders gotten their hands on them yet and tested them for DAW usage? Thoughts?

People with HP or Dell workstations or custom built rigs that used dual Sandy Bridge Xeons should be able to simply do a CPU swap (and maybe mobo bios update). You can now have a 24-core/48-thread DAW...

I'm very curious to hear comparisons to single-socket OC'd Haswell i7s...

mkdr · Post by **mkdr** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:37 am

Galbanum wrote:The new Xeon E5-2600 series was officially announced and released this past week at the Intel IDF.

Seems they are now already available at some retailers:

PROVANTAGE: Intel BX80635E52697V2 Xeon E5-2697 LGA2011 2.7GHZ 30MB Boxed

This is (theoretically) the CPU in the new Mac Pro.

Have any Wintel system builders gotten their hands on them yet and tested them for DAW usage? Thoughts?

People with HP or Dell workstations or custom built rigs that used dual Sandy Bridge Xeons should be able to simply do a CPU swap (and maybe mobo bios update). You can now have a 24-core/48-thread DAW...

I'm very curious to hear comparisons to single-socket OC'd Haswell i7s...

Sounds like an absolute beast

mandolarian · Post by **mandolarian** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 9:54 am

mkdr wrote:
Galbanum wrote:The new Xeon E5-2600 series was officially announced and released this past week at the Intel IDF.

Seems they are now already available at some retailers:

PROVANTAGE: Intel BX80635E52697V2 Xeon E5-2697 LGA2011 2.7GHZ 30MB Boxed

This is (theoretically) the CPU in the new Mac Pro.

Have any Wintel system builders gotten their hands on them yet and tested them for DAW usage? Thoughts?

People with HP or Dell workstations or custom built rigs that used dual Sandy Bridge Xeons should be able to simply do a CPU swap (and maybe mobo bios update). You can now have a 24-core/48-thread DAW...

I'm very curious to hear comparisons to single-socket OC'd Haswell i7s...
Sounds like an absolute beast

And a price to match: $2672.98

Just doing a quick core x Ghz. count, assuming everything scales nicely, the new Ivy Xeon could be about 15-18% faster than a 4.6-4.8Ghx 4930x for about 5X the cost. What's not to like? Will need to wait for some benchmarks compared to a 4 core OC Haswell.

Waiting until next year, when Haswell-E launches with a rumoured 8-10 cores with DDR4. That's when it gets exciting. And Haswell Xeons will be even bigger beasts.

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 6:44 pm

mandolarian wrote:
And a price to match: $2672.98

True... certainly not cheap. Full a dual with mobo, chassis, PSU, GPU, HDD, etc you are looking at at least a $7k system... Prob > $8k-$9k.

mandolarian wrote: Just doing a quick core x Ghz. count, assuming everything scales nicely, the new Ivy Xeon could be about 15-18% faster than a 4.6-4.8Ghx 4930x for about 5X the cost. What's not to like? Will need to wait for some benchmarks compared to a 4 core OC Haswell.

( 24 * 2.7 ) / ( 4 * 4.8 ) = 3.375 = 337.5 %

( 24 * 2.7 ) / ( 6 * 4.8 ) = 2.25 = 225.0 %

...theoretically... not to mention 30MB of shared cache is quite useful...

mandolarian wrote: Waiting until next year, when Haswell-E launches with a rumoured 8-10 cores with DDR4. That's when it gets exciting. And Haswell Xeons will be even bigger beasts.

True, Haswell Xeons will be even better of course, and they will bring AVX2 which offers a FMA instruction, which can speed up some things quite well...

Kaine · Post by **Kaine** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 3:57 pm

Galbanum wrote:The new Xeon E5-2600 series was officially announced and released this past week at the Intel IDF.

Not bothered yet, I found the Xeon SBE's to be poor value for money.

Due to the fact you can O.C. the regular i7's and not the Xeons, I was finding that I'd have to throw together over £3500 worth of motherboard, CPU's and memory in order to match what I could do with £700 (MB/CPU/Memory) of i7 Extreme. Baring in mind this is nothing more than a bump, I expect the situation to be unchanged.

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 7:43 pm

you may want to look at the single 12 core however! hint hint.. numbers coming

Scott
ADK

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 8:38 pm

jcschild wrote:you may want to look at the single 12 core however! hint hint.. numbers coming

Scott
ADK

do tell, do tell

Gonga · Post by **Gonga** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 8:55 pm

Interesting indeed!

Have to say though, my i7 3930K hasn't even so much as hiccupped running big projects, but I'm glad DIVA takes advantage of the multi-core processor. Few people need more than 4-6 cores I would guess...aren't most plugs still programmed to use only one core even for multiple instances? Memory was the thing I found I needed for the huge libraries I was loading up in Kontakt.

mandolarian · Post by **mandolarian** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 9:08 pm

Galbanum wrote:
jcschild wrote:you may want to look at the single 12 core however! hint hint.. numbers coming

Scott
ADK

do tell, do tell

No, don't! My system already feels old and so do I.

Andrew Souter · Post by **Andrew Souter** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 9:17 pm

Gonga wrote:Interesting indeed!

Have to say though, my i7 3930K hasn't even so much as hiccupped running big projects, but I'm glad DIVA takes advantage of the multi-core processor. Few people need more than 4-6 cores I would guess...aren't most plugs still programmed to use only one core even for multiple instances? Memory was the thing I found I needed for the huge libraries I was loading up in Kontakt.

yes, most are coded for single core... Including Aether and B2 at the moment...

But the interest in these extreme systems for me personally lies in the idea of using things such as Diva, Ace, Aether, B2, etc. with max quality settings, and not being forced to freeze things all the time. Freezing is perfectly fine for many sound-design and production trick/technique oriented musical styles, but lately I have personally gone more back into a linear classical music composition style where I would like keep everything live as long as possible before committing, especially while working on dense arrangements etc.

..and well, we at 2CAudio like to explore the extreme end of what we can do with the latest technology, which you will soon see again if we can get this final damn AAX bug fixed so we can release official updates to all of our existing products and move on to the next one...

Gribs · Post by **Gribs** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 2:26 am

Yowza! In my "professional" job I do computational optics, and one of the methods for problems that are in the geometric optics limit is non-sequential (Monte Carlo) ray tracing. Computationally, that is "embarrassingly parallel" and you can often get speed scaling proportional to the number of hyperthreads. I thought I was doing well with two 8-core Xeons in my current rig. We have cluster computers, too, and while I used to use them I just don't find them necessary for my work any more.

This begs the question whether the 8 core Xeons will come down in price. When the quad cores came down, I remember pricing out a build based around a Newegg deal for a small media server or DAW that was very economical.

Kaine · Post by **Kaine** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 10:24 am

jcschild wrote:you may want to look at the single 12 core however! hint hint.. numbers coming

That I look forward too mate, I haven't even considered testing one of those yet...

*checks price*

*picks self back up off floor*

Hmmm.... I wonder if the server boys have any samples I can play with.

DevonB · Post by **DevonB** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 11:45 am

Kaine wrote:
jcschild wrote:you may want to look at the single 12 core however! hint hint.. numbers coming
That I look forward too mate, I haven't even considered testing one of those yet...

*checks price*

*picks self back up off floor*

Hmmm.... I wonder if the server boys have any samples I can play with.

Ahhh, a quad socket board with E5-2697V2 for 48 cores for VMware? Ahhhh, now we're talking.

I remember the Unisys server that took up a full rack and a half of space (about 60U or so, as I recall?) that was only 64 CPU's and 96 PCI-X slots from around 2002 that cost about 1.1 million? Man, we've come a long ways.

$2600 sounds so cheap in comparison.

Devon

mkdr · Post by **mkdr** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 1:18 pm

Gonga wrote:Interesting indeed!

Have to say though, my i7 3930K hasn't even so much as hiccupped running big projects, but I'm glad DIVA takes advantage of the multi-core processor. Few people need more than 4-6 cores I would guess...aren't most plugs still programmed to use only one core even for multiple instances? Memory was the thing I found I needed for the huge libraries I was loading up in Kontakt.

Wouldn't it be better for big projects to disable plugins multi-core support and let the host do the core balancing? Most plugins are still made to use just one core mostly for this reason. Multi-core support only makes sense in stand-alone apps.

For Kontakt more RAM isn't nearly as useful as a fast SSD. Running with minimum pre-load and maximum streaming works great when seek times are tenth of a millisecond. You can't load up 100gig librarys fully on RAM anyway.

Galbanum wrote: yes, most are coded for single core... Including Aether and B2 at the moment...

But the interest in these extreme systems for me personally lie in the idea of using things such as Diva, Ace, Aether, B2, etc. with max quality settings, and not being forced to freeze things all the time.

They should run like that with modern cpu's with the single-core option too. But ofcourse, more is more

Gonga · Post by **Gonga** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 3:02 pm

mkdr wrote:
Gonga wrote:Interesting indeed!

Have to say though, my i7 3930K hasn't even so much as hiccupped running big projects, but I'm glad DIVA takes advantage of the multi-core processor. Few people need more than 4-6 cores I would guess...aren't most plugs still programmed to use only one core even for multiple instances? Memory was the thing I found I needed for the huge libraries I was loading up in Kontakt.
Wouldn't it be better for big projects to disable plugins multi-core support and let the host do the core balancing? Most plugins are still made to use just one core mostly for this reason. Multi-core support only makes sense in stand-alone apps.

For Kontakt more RAM isn't nearly as useful as a fast SSD. Running with minimum pre-load and maximum streaming works great when seek times are tenth of a millisecond. You can't load up 100gig librarys fully on RAM anyway.

Galbanum wrote: yes, most are coded for single core... Including Aether and B2 at the moment...

But the interest in these extreme systems for me personally lie in the idea of using things such as Diva, Ace, Aether, B2, etc. with max quality settings, and not being forced to freeze things all the time.
They should run like that with modern cpu's with the single-core option too. But ofcourse, more is more

Good points, thanks for the info. Sample libraries are a new thing for me. I no longer have RAM problems now that I have 32G, but my library drive is average speed. The SSDs large enough to handle my libraries however, are expensive. I'll wait for prices to come down.

New Ivy-Bridge Xeons: Xeon E5-2697 v2