anyone have an explination?

[Carey Langille]

Changed my computers procesor from a dual coreE7300 to a quad coreQ8300 and actually watched my numbers for system load go UP in Sawstudio.... I tried my cubase and its load seemed to decrease by a few points on the load meter, and PT 9 also went down a few points on the load meter... any idea why saws load would increase??? I sell Computer parts and the Dual core stuff is in the final stages, so getting older processorsis getting harder...soon we will only have Multicores to go to...and mother boards to support them.....

[Bob L]

There have to be a dozen threads here about this very subject... I have explained it multiple times...

Try shutting down a few cores and watch the numbers go back down.

It has to do with priority threading across cores and the fact that all cores are sharing the same RAM.

Bob L

[DominicPerry]

Core i3 is a dual core processor, and faster than either of the two you mentioned.

Dominic

[Carey Langille]

Thanks Bob, Do i tell SS to force to one cpu or do some kinda bootup thing? Also, if the bootup thing has to be done, im assuming this will affect the other programs as well? Yes Dominic you are correct, so you turn one of your cores off as well? All this core turning off has me a bit concerened.... Are we not defeating the benefits of Multiple cores?? Now i need to go run more tests....

[Tom Roberts]

Core i3 is a dual core processor, and faster than either of the two you mentioned.

Not according to the popular benchmark tests and available performance reviews, including those for audio encoding. The 8600 scores about three times faster.

Do you mean for SAW out of the box as opposed to other audio apps, or general CPU performance?

Thomas

[Grekim]

Thanks Bob, Do i tell SS to force to one cpu or do some kinda bootup thing? Also, if the bootup thing has to be done, im assuming this will affect the other programs as well? Yes Dominic you are correct, so you turn one of your cores off as well? All this core turning off has me a bit concerened.... Are we not defeating the benefits of Multiple cores?? Now i need to go run more tests....

I have it so the boot ini file gives me a choice of one or two cpu's.

[DominicPerry]

Not according to the popular benchmark tests and available performance reviews, including those for audio encoding. The 8600 scores about three times faster.

Do you mean for SAW out of the box as opposed to other audio apps, or general CPU performance?

Thomas

Thomas, you're partly right, I made a mistake with the Q8300, here's the Passmark Scores

Q8300 - 3565
Core i3 - 2709 (this is the cheap desktop version, there are slower mobile and faster desktop versions)
E7300 - 1820

But, when you consider the i3 is getting that score with 2 cores, whereas two of the Q8300 cores are useless to SAC and SAW, then the i3 is still doing well. I tend to assume that the CPU benchmarks make good use of all four cores - they tend not to be time critical tests like audio.
I haven't seen any of the audio-specific benchmarks, are they things like file rendering and 'how-many-reverbs-can-I-run?' type tests?

Carey, I leave both cores running - SAC and SAW are happy to use two, just not more. As Bob has recently pointed out to me, you can shut down cores in the BIOS.

Dominic

[Tom Roberts]

I haven't seen any of the audio-specific benchmarks, are they things like file rendering and 'how-many-reverbs-can-I-run?' type tests?

I found something awhile ago on the Tom's Hardware site about rendering audio performance test, and I seem to remember they used LAME MP3 conversion for the test. I can't seem to find it at the moment. I can't remember if they broke it down to systems or to CPU.

Not sure if that kind of offline processing is relevant to real time audio playback, but I found it interesting that it was included.

Thomas

EDIT: I found the link. I may have this wrong about the audio encoding "speed", and I certainly am not sure how that relates to real time processing.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/d...marks,112.html

[DominicPerry]

Thanks Thomas, I'll have a look at those.
Encoding MP3 is, as I'm sure you realise, an off-line task. In terms of the performance of particularly SAC, (and in terms of latency, SAW too), the real trick is a combination of mathematical operations and memory load/retrieval. As a rule, the more modern processors have better instruction sets for the former and simply faster architectures for the latter. Whether that translates to better real-world performance is hard to say without comparing like with like. That's the reason for the performance sticky at the head of the SAC forum. I can't make a direct comparison myself, as I didn't ever own a core duo processor.

Dominic

[Rabbit]

While we're on the subject of multi core processors, again. I'm looking to build a new machine for SAW... and SAC when the time comes, and I'm thinking the Intel E8600 dual core would be a good choice. Am I on track here?