Which is the hungriest Synth CPU wise nowadays?

[ReleaseCandidate]

I guess (I don't know of any other from Hungary) these are the most Hungarian:
https://www.adamszabo.com/vstplugins/

[agharta]

The M1 isn't faster than a mid tier desktop Intel i5 in benchmarks. The Apple hype train is rollin' hard.

I don't know where you got this from, but it's definitely false.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

As of May 11th M1 is obviously not at the top, but the some of them cost more than a whole Mac by itself. XEON, Threadripper, EPYC... the Core i9 12900 managed to score higher... good for Intel.

The M1 Ultra doesn’t look good value when you compare it against desktop chips as opposed to server chips.
It’s just above a £350 Ryzen 9 5900X but it starts at £4K for the entry level system.
Fortunately the lesser variants are much better value, especially the base model.

[chk071]

Well... check where the M1 is residing in that ranking.

I did and it's about 10 spots below a 12th Gen Core i3 - 14,687 for M1 as opposed to 14,955 for the i3 - which even you have to admit is pretty f**king embarrassing for Apple.

I don't think it's embarrassing. It's where I would expect a passively cooled mobile CPU. Actually, it's pretty impressive for a mobile CPU. It's not "the end of all things" though, and the one last high end CPU you'll ever need. Which has been claimed, and which I just said is wrong.

[chk071]

So far the intent of Apple is not to be the fastest, it’s to be the fastest efficient CPU primarily for mobile users.

Exactly.

[OllieBoi]

I'm in the market for a new music computer. I have used custom built PCs for years until I got so fed up with the stability issues that I switched to a 2015 Quad Core 2.9 GHz MacBook Pro in 2016. That's worked great in combination with my MOTU 16A Thunderbolt audio interface and my OWC ThunderBay Thunderbolt drive enclosure for four SSDs.

You would think that I would just go out and buy a Mac Studio Ultra but I thought I would compare prices of a similarly outfitted PC from a custom builder. (After building probably 10 PCs over the years I'm done with that. I just want something that works out of the box.)

I chose the current top of the line Intel 16-core 3.2 GHz 12900K processor and then matched the same specs for a Mac Studio Ultra in terms of storage and RAM. On the Fundamental AV site (www.fundamentalav.com), a PC with the 12900K processor, a 4 TB NVMe drive, 64 GB of RAM, the cheapest video card on offer, and a water cooled enclosure comes to $5,198.00.

A Mac Studio Ultra with similar specs is $4,999.

What about performance? Because the 12900K chip runs at a higher clock speed (and thus must be water cooled to get the noise down to even remotely acceptable levels) it's not surprising that the Intel chip outperforms the Apple M1 Ultra chip (which runs at a base clock speed of 2.0 GHz) by about 15%. However, the M1 Ultra beats the Intel 12900K chip by 30% (!) in multicore performance.

Given the Mac Studio is much smaller, runs much quieter, uses half the power, and is about the same price as the PC, that's the direction I'm heading.

So your claim that an equivalent Mac Studio Ultra would cost over $10,000 is just nonsense.

both seem overpriced honestly. I don't think 5,000 on a computer is reasonable for music production, 2000 should be more than enough and that's a lot of good components already (i9, M2 4 TB drives, 32 Gb or DDR5 ram)

I just build a cheap one for 900 USD with an i5 12600k, at 128 buffer I can run 200 tracks of the demo project in Ableton Live at only 80% of the CPU, that's quite absurd honestly. I can't imagine spending 5 times that for like maybe double the performance?

I don't know how the motu interfaces perform in windows nowadays, specially the thunderbolt ones, but I would look into RME with all that money or maybe just order one form vintage king audio an compare performance, curious if motu has closed the gap on PC.

I paid around $3,500 for my current 15” MacBook Pro which was one of the fastest laptops on the market. (I’m sure I could have paid less for some hideous plastic 10 pound “gamer” laptop. But then I would have to live with myself.)

Anyway, even at the time I realized the MacBook Pro would not be powerful enough to run all of the CPU-intensive plugins I wanted to run. So I bought the top of the line Intel NUC with a quad core 2.7 GHz processor and loaded it up with 32 GB of RAM and 2 TB of internal storage. I have been running the NUC as a slave PC using Vienna Ensemble Pro ever since.

The NUC is great. It has tons of I/O, is almost silent and is about the size of a small paperback book.

But even with the NUC, I need more processing power. Hence the need to spend $5,000 on either a big hulking PC tower or a Mac Studio Ultra that can sit on my desk under my monitor.

Oh, and regarding RME audio interfaces, I’ve had two: a Digiface PCI system and a RayDat PCIe setup. I swear these cards were the cause of most of the instability on my PCs. Never again.

[j wazza]

softube modular

[OllieBoi]

softube modular

For sure!

[sQeetz]

softube modular

It is quite tame here… Cherry Audio’s Voltage Modular on the other hand takes the crown of most CPU heavy plugin. Although it’s native. Just idling with nothing loaded it hogs CPU like crazy

[sqigls]

RME = instability!?
jebuz, i can weather the Bonestorming, but that idea is just f**king nuts

further context is required captain.

[Cogency]

+1 for Pigments.
Don't know if M1 will change the situation for this monster, but hope so...

[vertibration]

The whole point of buying an M1 is silicon native plugins that are optimized for CPU reduction.

Its not whether an M1 is more powerful or less powerful that the best AMD or Intel, its how a plugin is optimized. You can have a PC that outperforms an M1, but a silicon native plugin running in lets say Logic X will be smooth as butter. I cant remember how many instances of Diva that Urs said you could run, but it was an insane amount with high voice counts without any drop outs.

[nanostream]

+1 for Pigments.
Don't know if M1 will change the situation for this monster, but hope so...

I have a Drum Rack in Ableton Live with 8 Pigments instances, and it barely registers on a M1 Mac. I takes a while to load, though.

These protracted discussions about benchmarks and whatnot are so silly. vertibration was basically right, get a M1 Mac, and you’ll be fine for a while. (Yes, we know there are alternatives which are also very good. If they float your boat, then use them. It’s fine. Nobody cares!)

[OllieBoi]

The M1 isn't faster than a mid tier desktop Intel i5 in benchmarks. The Apple hype train is rollin' hard.

I don't know where you got this from, but it's definitely false.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

As of May 11th M1 is obviously not at the top, but the some of them cost more than a whole Mac by itself. XEON, Threadripper, EPYC... the Core i9 12900 managed to score higher... good for Intel.

The M1 Ultra doesn’t look good value when you compare it against desktop chips as opposed to server chips.
It’s just above a £350 Ryzen 9 5900X but it starts at £4K for the entry level system.
Fortunately the lesser variants are much better value, especially the base model.

I don’t know what you are talking about when you say that the Mac Studio has been compared to a PC with “server chips.”

I compared the Apple M1 Ultra chip to a high end Intel 12900K consumer grade chip that is often used in gaming rigs such as the Corsair One “small form factor” PC that costs around $4,500 and comes with only a 2 TB NVMe internal drive.

Again, the Mac Studio Ultra is not overpriced for what you get.

[chk071]

Why pick the M1 Ultra anyway?

This is the original quote:

None, get an M1....problem solved

No mention of anything other than... the M1. No mention of $4000 Macs either.

[vitocorleone123]

The whole point of buying an M1 is silicon native plugins that are optimized for CPU reduction.

Its not whether an M1 is more powerful or less powerful that the best AMD or Intel, its how a plugin is optimized. You can have a PC that outperforms an M1, but a silicon native plugin running in lets say Logic X will be smooth as butter. I cant remember how many instances of Diva that Urs said you could run, but it was an insane amount with high voice counts without any drop outs.

Urs develops on a Mac and prefers Macs, and prioritizes Macs. If you're going to bring optimization in, then a developer would have to well and truly optimize for all 3 CPUs (Intel, AMD, and Mac) in order to compare more objectively. Until then, it's TBD.