Ableton Forum

I'd like to buy a 2009 Mac Pro and noticed in todays benchmarks that the 8 core 2.26GHz is slower than the 4 core 2,9GHz processor at single-threaded tasks (oh wonder).

So the question is.. should i go with 8 cores?

Search around a bit, there's been plenty of discussion lately about performance with multiple cores.
In short: Live will use them well as best as it can, but it depends heavily on routing and effects.

Well.. i didn't find any really proper answers or an answer by some ableton employee. That's why i started this thread.

Would someone mind pointing me to a thread where this is discussed?

Daim wrote:I'd like to buy a 2009 Mac Pro and noticed in todays benchmarks that the 8 core 2.26GHz is slower than the 4 core 2,9GHz processor at single-threaded tasks (oh wonder).

So the question is.. should i go with 8 cores?

Do you have a link to those benchmarks? I've heard that Live does take advantage of 8 cores, but it would be nice to get some official confirmation and explanation. I'm looking to buy that machine as well.

http://www.macrumors.com/2009/03/10/neh ... enchmarks/

there's no benchmark for the quad 2.93 yet, my fault. but the article suggests to get a faster quad version if u have more single threaded tasks.. one should think that music apps utilize multiple cores very well.. but who knows

Daim wrote:http://www.macrumors.com/2009/03/10/neh ... enchmarks/

there's no benchmark for the quad 2.93 yet, my fault. but the article suggests to get a faster quad version if u have more single threaded tasks.. one should think that music apps utilize multiple cores very well.. but who knows

I've heard that Snow Leopard is really geared to taking advantage of multiple cores

Of course, but I don't know if Live will benefit from that.

I'm leaning towards the 2x2,26 version at the moment.. more ram and the possibility to replace the cpus with 2 faster xeons one day. It's more future proof.

Daim wrote:Of course, but I don't know if Live will benefit from that.

I'm leaning towards the 2x2,26 version at the moment.. more ram and the possibility to replace the cpus with 2 faster xeons one day. It's more future proof.

Is that the single quad? I don't believe the cpus can be upgraded on any of them afaik.

rbro wrote:I've heard that Snow Leopard is really geared to taking advantage of multiple cores

Yeah, but it hasn't been released yet and there will be some kinks I'm sure.

For music production I've had some real workhorse projects and I have yet to get either Cubase 4.5 or Live 7 to go very high in CPU usage with my quadcore 2.66ghz Mac Pro and 8gb of RAM. It actually flies.

Is Live 7 or 8 a 64-bit application? I know for a fact that Cubase 4.5 isn't and won't be upgraded to it either (even though Steinberg mentioned this as a feature when they released C4). Without it being 64-bit, there's not much point because you'll hit a max amount of RAM it can use (2gb iirc) first regardless of cores.

rbro wrote:

Daim wrote:Of course, but I don't know if Live will benefit from that.

I'm leaning towards the 2x2,26 version at the moment.. more ram and the possibility to replace the cpus with 2 faster xeons one day. It's more future proof.

Is that the single quad? I don't believe the cpus can be upgraded on any of them afaik.

2x2,26 are two quads = 8 cores, they can be upgraded for sure..

Daim wrote:

rbro wrote:

Daim wrote:Of course, but I don't know if Live will benefit from that.

I'm leaning towards the 2x2,26 version at the moment.. more ram and the possibility to replace the cpus with 2 faster xeons one day. It's more future proof.

Is that the single quad? I don't believe the cpus can be upgraded on any of them afaik.

2x2,26 is two quads, they can be upgraded for sure..

So that's the 8 Core. I asked at the Apple store and they told me the CPUs could not be upgraded in the future. That's the machine I'm leaning towards as well.

It cannot be upgraded by Apple because they don't offer that. But if you buy the processors on your own there's no problem with it, you will only lose warranty. I wouldn't upgrade so soon anyway due to the nehalem entry prices..

And replacing 2 CPUs isn't magic.. you could still keep the old ones for warranty purposes.

Daim wrote:Well.. i didn't find any really proper answers or an answer by some ableton employee. That's why i started this thread.

I meant search the forum. Here are a couple threads that might help:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... iple+cores
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... iple+cores
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... iple+cores

Thx! Haven't found those myself..