Ableton Forum

Hello all,

I am in the market to build the beastiest beast of a beast machine I can build, and I have my eyes on the 9980XE i9 CPU at 2k$, which has 18 cores in it, with hyper threading that's 36, and so that means 4 can't be used on windows.

Why is this the case?

I would wait before buying any components, as the new AMD Ryzen chips and motherboards are out in July, they seem to offer significant performance for less money than their equivilant Intel offering, plus the also have the new flagship Ryzen 9 3950X, which according to benchmarks so far, trounces the Intel i9, that will be available around September it seems.

I will definitely hold out! I'm not in a rush since I'm still saving up for it. That's the great thing about technology, the longer you wait, the better CPU you can get!

I used to work for Intel and AMD amongst other tech companies doing processor and networking design.

The threading issue has more to do with the OS than the hardware underneath it. Threads are spawned by processes (Live runs as one process) and each process is allocated memory space by the OS. There are hard limits based on the total memory space, how much space a particular thread can allocate, how much space a particular process can allocate plus space for what is called the stack which is where the processor stores information about the processes and threads as it switches back and forth between tasks. I would assume that on Mac OS, the allocation limits allow Live to run more threads than it can on Windows and that's all there is to it.

I'm a hardware guy though, maybe some software engineer types here can discuss this further if you want to know the hairy details.

That answers my question perfectly thank you!!

Well I have my Ryzen 3600 & x570 rig up and running, and initial impressions are WOW... Knocks my old Intel i5 4460 into history. Without any major tweaking/optimising I have immediately got my overall latency under 9ms 128buffer, may go lower, but I need to get all my stuff installed onto this fresh rig. Only tweaks I have done is Ram XMP turned on (3600mhz), disabled Cpu C States & Precision boost on.