Does Live 12 utilize Intel E cores?

[Ylee]

I'm considering upgrading to 14900k but wanted to make sure Live 12 utilizes E cores. I know with some Apple silicon it only uses the performance cores. Does anyone know for sure if Live 12 uses Intel E cores? Or just P cores?

Thanks!!

[Machinesworking]

I'm considering upgrading to 14900k but wanted to make sure Live 12 utilizes E cores. I know with some Apple silicon it only uses the performance cores. Does anyone know for sure if Live 12 uses Intel E cores? Or just P cores?

Thanks!!

I would seriously doubt that Live 12 would use E cores on PC but not E cores on Mac.

For the record Logic also does not use E cores on Mac, but DP, Cubase and Reaper all do. It might be a stability thing, I don't know? but it means for the first time in decades Logic is almost as much of a CPU pig as Live. My tests had Live at about 90 instances of Diva compared to 105 with Logic, while DP and Reaper got 140. Apparently Cubase does just as well, don't own it so...

[Machinesworking]

It might be possible somehow on PC to force e core use though, dunno?

[Ylee]

Well damn. I was hoping to hear otherwise. I wanted to grab the 24 core 14900k as an upgrade from my 12700k.

But both the 12700k and 14900k only have 8 P cores....so if Ableton is only going to use P cores I see no sense taking that upgrade path.

I'll probably switch over to AMD eventually then since they don't use the big.little core structure currently. The 9950x has a whopping 16 cores and 32 threads.

Do developers ever post here? Would love to get an official answer from them regarding Intel E cores. Surprised there is no information out there regarding this. Seems like a pretty important thing to know.

[Machinesworking]

Well damn. I was hoping to hear otherwise. I wanted to grab the 24 core 14900k as an upgrade from my 12700k.

But both the 12700k and 14900k only have 8 P cores....so if Ableton is only going to use P cores I see no sense taking that upgrade path.

I'll probably switch over to AMD eventually then since they don't use the big.little core structure currently. The 9950x has a whopping 16 cores and 32 threads.

Do developers ever post here? Would love to get an official answer from them regarding Intel E cores. Surprised there is no information out there regarding this. Seems like a pretty important thing to know.

Someone already posted in this forum that PC's also do not use e cores with Live. I'm on the fence about this. Apple has decided to not use e cores with Logic, this might be due to Logics design, but it also could be due to some issue with DAWs switching between e cores and p cores. I have Reaper and don't really use it, and the other DAW I have Digital Performer while getting far more power out of the Mac Studio Ultra is a bit less stable with plugins in the Ultra than it has been on and old Intel mac here. It could be the reason why e cores aren't used by Logic.

I'm not surprised Live doesn't use them, Ableton are about uninterrupted audio while messing with the interface.

[M-bition]

I just bought and installed an I9-14900K and this news to me that Ableton would not use E-cores freaked me out for sure.
I started to run a heavy set and checking the processess and the E-cores weren’t used indeed…..
At first one P-core was heavily used and all the other cores hardly. I am still wondering why.

I always have Process Lasso running in the background with Ableton set to high priority.
I started to check the cores in CPU affinity and in CPU set and now all P and E cores are being used.

First I got all P-cores running with increased performance and now, with all cores running, performance has increased significantly.

I am glad to learn Ableton can use all cores but I don’t know if this somehow will create new performance issues.

[Machinesworking]

I am glad to learn Ableton can use all cores but I don’t know if this somehow will create new performance issues.

That is the concern on the Mac side as well, Liogic is Apples baby and it does not use e-cores. I haven't heard of a way to go into Terminal to force Logic and Live to use e cores on the Mac side, since it's Unix underneath it's probably possible, but who knows if without a DAW and OS level code to facilitate the noticalble difference in power between cores if that's a good idea?

[benmuetsch]

Logic and Ableton are the last DAWs not utilizing E-Cores.

[Machinesworking]

Logic and Ableton are the last DAWs not utilizing E-Cores.

Count in Bitwig, Pro Tools as well. I haven't tested, but it's very likely that FL Studio and Reason do not either. MPC 2 doesn't but it's fair to wait for MPC 3 in a few months to pass judgement there.

Again, unless it's a structural thing with the way Logic was designed all those years ago I would say Apple might be erroring on the side of caution here, as in jumping from e cores to p cores might add instability. I do not think it's an intentional crippling of Logic.

[benmuetsch]

There is a recent review of the new M4 processors and a comparison vs M1 / M2 / M3 by by James Zhan. He testet 7 DAWs afaik and Pro Tools, FL Studio and Studio One now all utilize E-Cores to some degree, at least on the Mac side.

I believe that while individual tracks in a DAW can be fully parallelized, it should be possible to assign lower-intensity tracks to the E-cores, perhaps limiting each E-core to handle two or three tracks.