New MBP's and the death of desktops for us studio nerds?

[Khazul]

@ Tarekith; I don't think that your assumption is correct, because of the fact that these i7 processors are a new generation they could be more powerful per Ghz then the ones that were introduced last year. A Pentium 2.8Ghz will be beaten by any i3, i5 or i7 processor on any clockspeed...

+1

and

The 2010 I7 2,66 can overclok/turbo boost his frequency to 3,33 ghz if needed and the newest 2,2 quad can also raise his speed to 3,33...so Tarekith theory is not valid here

Then there are some who just overclock the things to 4Ghz and disable the turbo boost

[cids]

New CPU features
The new CPUs retain the Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 monikers that Intel has used for a few years, but the naming scheme is a bit misleading: These processors have a whole new architecture, and aren't simply a revision.

The company optimized and enlarged the caches for "micro-ops" used in the CPU, allowing for more-efficient, faster handling of tasks. Performance for AES encryption and SHA-1 hash operations is improved. A new set of vector extensions (called AVX) promises to rev up performance in some data-intensive applications, once they have been optimized to use the new instructions. And a new ring bus enables faster communications between cores and the integrated graphics processor.

Intel has made technical changes within the CPU cores, as well, most of which are of interest only to coders and compiler developers. What you need to know as a consumer is this: Performance should be better in just about any application that relies heavily on the CPU.

Enhancements to Intel's Turbo Boost technology will let the new Core CPUs run at higher clock speeds more often. The automatic speed-boosting feature used to work only if one or two of the cores were active while the others were idle. Now, if conditions are right, it can operate even when all cores are busy, and it can also boost the speed of the graphics processor a bit, if necessary.

[beats me]

Jebus, I haven't used a desktop in years for anything.

i'm on a 2core 2.5ghz, 4gigs of RAM on my MBP and unfortunately most of my projects won't run on it. i'm usually about 10-12 midi tracks, 30-40 audio tracks + returns, etc.

not at all trying to criticise your workflow, but it really surprises me when I hear people say this. I can't understand for a start how you can really need that much going on at once. Some of my best tracks have about 5 or 6 tracks going at once (I guess that's not strictly accurate as some of those would be drum racks, so technically each drum is a track of its own, but even there I don't usually have all sounds playing at the same time.)

I'm still on a 2009 white macbook and I very rarely reach the limit, and if I do I increase the buffer size just while I am working on that song (assuming that by the time I have got to that point I don't need to worry too much about latency any more)

I guess I just got into a habit of being more frugal as well because I've been doing this since computers couldn't so anything but MIDI. I used to work in a studio where we had to back up to JAZZ drive every day because the hard drive filled up just working at 44.1/16bit - in fact sometimes even 8k/8bit when working on phone formats.... just blows my mind to hear of people running out of juice on the machines we have these days....

I’m a serious track count abuser and agree I should cut back. But whenever you see a screen shot from a PRO producer of even the most minimal of sounding songs you’re still looking at 40+ tracks on the screen.

[ARDJ]

I’m a serious track count abuser and agree I should cut back. But whenever you see a screen shot from a PRO producer of even the most minimal of sounding songs you’re still looking at 40+ tracks on the screen.

Same and really we're at a point, technology wise where our music shouldn't' be limited by processing power. That's a fact. I have some projects that are 12 channels and others that are 75+. It happens and I'm not going to stop adding things to a song because my computer can't handle it, I add what's needed when it's needed never once even looking up at my CPU meter.


Anyways, I'm going to wait about another 6-9 mos before i get the new MBP, i'll update this thread when i do or if anyone else gets one feel free to update this!

[LoopStationZebra]

SEVENTYFIVEPLUS!

[Rave]

My iMac i7 with 8th ram rules.

I use a lot Of soft synths and instances of reverb etc too and dont have an issue. I think the maci e will be useful for 5 years (if not longer). It does everything I need it to do.

[ze2be]

If you think I'm going off topic, consider Logic Nodes, Xgrid and the Pixar rendering farms...
Thunderbolt and over a decade of experience may soon allow Osx Developers to make apps that use several cores on several computers. It probably won't be for gaming and real-time performing yet, but we'll definitely see some forms of supercomputing in the near future.

I remember we did that when I worked as a motion graphic designer, 2001. We used all the macs in the office to render from one master mac. About 10 of them. Cant remember if it used firewire or the network.

[Forge.]

I’m a serious track count abuser and agree I should cut back. But whenever you see a screen shot from a PRO producer of even the most minimal of sounding songs you’re still looking at 40+ tracks on the screen.

Same and really we're at a point, technology wise where our music shouldn't' be limited by processing power. That's a fact. I have some projects that are 12 channels and others that are 75+. It happens and I'm not going to stop adding things to a song because my computer can't handle it, I add what's needed when it's needed never once even looking up at my CPU meter.


Anyways, I'm going to wait about another 6-9 mos before i get the new MBP, i'll update this thread when i do or if anyone else gets one feel free to update this!

"Pro" producers? *sigh*... beats, I hope you were being ironic with that comment.

Anyway, I guess, as I did concede, if you count drum racks as individual tracks for each drum then I guess that could add another 10 or so for each one, and if there are a lot of double tracked vocals then that could add up.. I suppose it's genre specific really as well, if you had a lot of instruments, multi-miked drums, multiple tracked vocals, etc etc then sure it can add up, but that's largely audio tracks and they are not likely to be all playing at the same time.... or need warping.... if they do then really you need to develop better work practices....

but to me the mere thought of 75 tracks just sounds like madness..... unless you're recording an orchestra, in which case I'd say Live is the wrong tool for that job...

in fact in general I think when you're wanting track counts that high Live is not the right tool, because it's designed from the ground up to do everything in real time, which adds CPU overhead by it's nature... you would have much better results with your "wall of sound" with other DAWs - Logic being a noted example of getting way higher track count for this reason

I'm really curious though, what genre are you making and what do you have on all those 75 tracks?

[doghouse]

few audio interfaces are even close limited by USB2 for either data bandwidth or latency

You're kidding, right? All you have to do to use up all the bandwidth is increase the number of simultaneous I/O channels. Sure a 2X2 interface won't be stressed, but what about those pushing over 16 channels.

It is true that the Thunderbolt/Lightpeak interface is intended for video more than audio.

[beats me]

I’m a serious track count abuser and agree I should cut back. But whenever you see a screen shot from a PRO producer of even the most minimal of sounding songs you’re still looking at 40+ tracks on the screen.

Same and really we're at a point, technology wise where our music shouldn't' be limited by processing power. That's a fact. I have some projects that are 12 channels and others that are 75+. It happens and I'm not going to stop adding things to a song because my computer can't handle it, I add what's needed when it's needed never once even looking up at my CPU meter.


Anyways, I'm going to wait about another 6-9 mos before i get the new MBP, i'll update this thread when i do or if anyone else gets one feel free to update this!

"Pro" producers? *sigh*... beats, I hope you were being ironic with that comment.

Anyway, I guess, as I did concede, if you count drum racks as individual tracks for each drum then I guess that could add another 10 or so for each one, and if there are a lot of double tracked vocals then that could add up.. I suppose it's genre specific really as well, if you had a lot of instruments, multi-miked drums, multiple tracked vocals, etc etc then sure it can add up, but that's largely audio tracks and they are not likely to be all playing at the same time.... or need warping.... if they do then really you need to develop better work practices....

but to me the mere thought of 75 tracks just sounds like madness..... unless you're recording an orchestra, in which case I'd say Live is the wrong tool for that job...

in fact in general I think when you're wanting track counts that high Live is not the right tool, because it's designed from the ground up to do everything in real time, which adds CPU overhead by it's nature... you would have much better results with your "wall of sound" with other DAWs - Logic being a noted example of getting way higher track count for this reason

I'm really curious though, what genre are you making and what do you have on all those 75 tracks?

I don't know if "ironic" would be the right word for what I was being there. But I certainly didn't mean nobody on here could be considered pro because they don't have a top 10 selling song on iTunes. But you know what I'm talking about, anytime there is an interview vid with some big name producer in his studio he always has an insane amount of tracks on the screen.

But I will concede a lot of that is individual drum hits or even tracks dedicated to one shots that only happen a time or two in the track. It's not a lot of instruments playing throughout the entire track.

But I still say Live will choke long before most other DAWs. I also understand it's Live's nature to have everything active even if you aren't hearing it, although I don't know why Ableton can't add a kill switch to each track that is indeed a true kill and not just a mute.

I think I'm also reaching a point where I don't think Live is a great writing tool, CPU issues aside, I think it's way too easy to start wondering off in a million directions and not really get anything done. Some people think that's great but I'm willing to bet there are a lot of people who don't get anything done because of Live's endless noodling nature. Shit, I was working on Garageband the other day for the first time and I got a lot farther along in a song in one sitting than I do most times with Live in a week because I had definite limitations and there wasn't a lot of "I wonder if........." or "one more....." going on.

[Khazul]

few audio interfaces are even close limited by USB2 for either data bandwidth or latency

You're kidding, right? All you have to do to use up all the bandwidth is increase the number of simultaneous I/O channels. Sure a 2X2 interface won't be stressed, but what about those pushing over 16 channels.

It is true that the Thunderbolt/Lightpeak interface is intended for video more than audio.

Have you worked out just how many I/O channels you have to increase it to?

44.1Khz sample rate and bit depth fo 24 bit, you need 132300 bytes per second of audi data, or 1058400 bits. Add another 10% for protocol overheads - about 1.2Mbps needed per channel. USB2 allows for upto 480Mbps. Even if you conservatively say can use only half of that, thats still a hell of alot of channels - ie 200 or more.

Now if you can find me an audio interface with that number of channels. Good for you. At 192Kbps used in some film editing, thats still 40+ channels, possibly even upto 80 channels.

Granted when using such huge numbers of channels, minimum useable latency will creep up a bit, but still only a small fraction of current audio application latencies. With small audio buffers (ie < 1K), using this many channel will probbaly be limited by the application and OS drivers long before USB2 becomes the limit.

Thunderbolt has potential as a useful replacement interface for current very high end DAW -> large format console mixing which is often currentluy handled by multiple PCI-e cards and needs a fast machine (high end Mac pro, PC workstation etc). RME claim 192 channels are usuable as a maximum with 3 of their MADI PCI-e cards at I guess 96k sample rate. In a perfect world with perfect zero CPU use USB2 drivers USB2 theretically has just about enough bandwidth to manage this as well, but no driver would ever cope.

[Tarekith]

@ Tarekith; I don't think that your assumption is correct, because of the fact that these i7 processors are a new generation they could be more powerful per Ghz then the ones that were introduced last year. A Pentium 2.8Ghz will be beaten by any i3, i5 or i7 processor on any clockspeed...

"Could be" I guess is the key phrase there. Honestly, Just repeating something a developer friend of mine was discussing with me after we saw the new MBPs. I haven't seen a test yet that just tests the processing power allocated on a per track basis, but I think it's something worth thinking about from a DAW point of view. I don't doubt th overall power and number crunching increases of the new CPU's, I just wonder if the lower clock speed will have any real world side effects like I mentioned.

[3phase]

wouldnt be the first time that a so called faster processor would be the slower one for audio people..

isnt the first time that i heard that the new macs appear a bit slow on first sight.. but might be user errors... defently a point to keep an eye on during the next weeks

[kenn michael]

@ Tarekith; I don't think that your assumption is correct, because of the fact that these i7 processors are a new generation they could be more powerful per Ghz then the ones that were introduced last year. A Pentium 2.8Ghz will be beaten by any i3, i5 or i7 processor on any clockspeed...

"Could be" I guess is the key phrase there. Honestly, Just repeating something a developer friend of mine was discussing with me after we saw the new MBPs. I haven't seen a test yet that just tests the processing power allocated on a per track basis, but I think it's something worth thinking about from a DAW point of view. I don't doubt th overall power and number crunching increases of the new CPU's, I just wonder if the lower clock speed will have any real world side effects like I mentioned.

According to geekbench scores, the new machines are definitely faster than the previous generation and the older i7 chips. They're scoring above 10000, which is about the same score as my 2008 2.8GHz 8-core Mac Pro.

I only bring up geekbench because it's scoring system between systems echoes audio performance I experience in apps like Logic. Very excited about the new MBPs! Just watched a video where they streamed 4 uncompressed HD video streams from a Thunderbolt RAID on a MBP and then displayed the resulting video on a Cinema Display daisy chained from the same port. The RAID's throughput was 700MB/s!!! Insane.

[McQ714]

Matthias at RME noted that RME will not implement Thunderbolt into any interfaces as it is a proprietary system that requires Intel's chips and "always translates to PCI Express".

Somewhat disappointing news but I guess it's really not necessary for current audio interfaces. Apogee says they are working on using it, however. And Universal Audio commented on it's possible use in the future. UAD-3???

It seems it will be a great solution for data transfer/backups and video so just use it for recording to external RAID systems, if nothing else. Hard drives will always be the "bottleneck" of your computer. Anything you can do to cut down on the lag of your hard drive will be your best option for upgrades.