CPU Recommendations? Single Core vs Multi Core Speed

[DanChristos]

Hi!

I've always wondered why Ableton Live does not fully utilise all of the cores of my CPU. I've run various Live versions across various machines, and they all exhibit the same issue. I have over the years checked up on forums and have seen a whole variety of explanations and reasons.

Most recently I've been running on an Intel core i7-8750 inside a Lenovo Thinkpad x1. I've been using a Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 Gen2 and have been able to run at 48kHz and a buffer of only 64 or sometimes 32 samples and can still load up Live with quite a bit before I have Ableton's CPU meter peaking out. So if I push up the buffer, and build my set up until Live's internal CPU meter goes way over 100%, at this point I can have audio crackling and distorting like crazy, but if I go and do other things in Windows, other apps load up absolutely fine. I can even load Blender and use Blender on my CPU, just fine. When I investigate and look at the CPU usage, Task Manager tells me that Live is at roughly 20-30% of CPU utilisation. When I look at my CPU Core utilisation charts I see that most of my cores are just sitting idle.

I am looking to purpose build a system for Live 12, so when I come to choose a CPU, how do I choose? Do number of cores mean anything to Live's performance? Or should I be basing my decision purely on single-core speed?

[DanChristos]

So I've just found out that if I side-chain across 2 tracks, they will run on a single thread. So this would explain it to some extent, but I don't use side-chaining on everything. Also I make use of quite complex parallel effects chains on some of my tracks, but then on others there might literally be just a single plugin and an EQ Eight

[cids]

How many threads are used per Live track?
Live uses one thread to process a signal path. A signal path is a single chain of audio flow. In tracks where instrument or effect racks are used, with multiple chains in parallel, Live may use one thread per chain depending on how CPU-intensive each chain may be. If two tracks are "chained" by routing, for instance by a side-chain routing, they are considered dependent tracks and count as one signal path. Any dependent set of tracks will use one thread each.

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/artic ... ndling-FAQ

[papawise]

I add to this question.
Where to look about this subject? I don't see any clear/clever explanation.

How could it be that there is no source of useful information without needing to become a scientific digger in computing science?