Who's getting a quad core?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.

Who's getting a quad core?

Me!
11
50%
Not me!
11
50%
 
Total votes: 22

nebulae
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Who's getting a quad core?

Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 6:42 pm

After salivating over Core2Duos for some time, I've come to the conclusion that my P4 3.2 Ghz lappie is still good enough for playing out, and still plenty good for production. My next machine will be a desktop, and I'll use the laptop for gigs, but I'll use the more powerful desktop for production and studio work.

So then the whole new world of bleeding edge technology opens up. And I'm thinkin' QUADcore in a couple of months! Thoughts? Concerns? Brian farts?

nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 6:42 pm

It also seems like AMD is hard at work at a comeback, and they seem to have a decent strategy for quads.

mbenigni
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Post by mbenigni » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:19 pm

Timing's not right. Not enough software will give sufficient payback on more than 2 cores. I'll jump on an upgrade to Core 2 Duo as those prices start to drop, and see what happens with multi-core next year.

I used to love the thrill of buying into latest and greatest technology, but recently things have been moving so fast it's entirely pointless. Stuff is deprecated and forgotten before anybody even starts using it. And the second-tier hardware is insanely powerful anyway.

mbenigni
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Post by mbenigni » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:20 pm

P.S. Who's this "Brian", and what has he been eating?

nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:30 pm

Likely a cocktail of beans and PII chips. Fairly gaseous.

anti-banausic
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Post by anti-banausic » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:32 pm

nebulae wrote:It also seems like AMD is hard at work at a comeback, and they seem to have a decent strategy for quads.
I used to want to go AMD about 2 years ago, but I think that Intel will still be the killer, even with quad cores.
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Post by jamester » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:39 pm

I will build a n ew daw in the next month or so (probably PC Audiolabs), and it will indeed be quad-core!
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yourmom
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Post by yourmom » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:41 pm

mbenigni wrote:Timing's not right. Not enough software will give sufficient payback on more than 2 cores. I'll jump on an upgrade to Core 2 Duo as those prices start to drop, and see what happens with multi-core next year.
forget other softwares.. what about live. will it be able to distribute CPU cycles amongst more than 2 cores at once?

nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:42 pm

I believe Live is fine with multiple cores over 2. Can anyone confirm?

mbenigni
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Post by mbenigni » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:44 pm

Based on personal experience, I'm not sure Live is doing all that much with 2 cores.

nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:46 pm

explain

darkcatt
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Post by darkcatt » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:47 pm

AMD and Intel are pretty neck and neck. I talked with my AMD rep about hte new intel chip set adn he said that intel's quoad core is not what it could be because of how the core use the same infatructure. He said AMD will be a true quad core and smoke em'.


In my experience there is very little difference, except Intel charges more. Amd goes cheaper to gain market share (EG: Dell, and HP server ( starting with the DL385 series), and MS is now writing code with AMD in mind so the market is changing to AMD's favor.

In the end I think they are the same damn thing wait for the first generation to end life cycle, then get it when the second gen's roll !!!!!
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nebulae
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Post by nebulae » Wed Jan 24, 2007 7:50 pm

agreed...right now the Core2Duos are the best bet, but if I can wait a bit, the AMD Quadcore might be a great option.

mbenigni
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Post by mbenigni » Wed Jan 24, 2007 8:02 pm

explain
Just based on the measure of performance that matters to me: the number of VST and VSTi's I can run at low latency before experiencing dropouts, the performance of Live 6 - with the introduction of dual core support - isn't appreciably different than Live 5 on my Core Duo laptop.

The bottleneck is likely the ASIO driver at these latencies. I'm sure there's some gain in some other scenario that I'm not benefiting from, so I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek in implying that Live doesn't leverage dual core.

mbenigni
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Post by mbenigni » Wed Jan 24, 2007 8:05 pm

In my experience there is very little difference, except Intel charges more.
This really isn't true at the moment. In a couple of months... who knows? But right now, Intel has a QuadCore chip in the marketplace and it works (except it costs a fortune) whereas the closest tech AMD is shipping is actually a matched pair of dual core chips which they market as a QuadCore solution - and which are notoriously power-hungry, hot, and not as fast as the Intel competition.

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