Ableton Forum

I am going to be building a new windows 7 music rig, and am looking at a dual 16 core opteron machine.
Each cpu has 16 cores to give me a total of 32 cores at 2.4 ghz.

I will be using 2 Opteron 6378 processors on a Asus KGPE-D16 motherboard.

Is this a good choice for ableton? can ableton and my vsts take full advantage of this?

i think that taking full advantage of that is a bit like using a shotgun to kill flies.

if you're asking if it will run Live, yes.

...as long as you're installing some RAM too.

I think a lot depends on if the software will use all 32 cores. That would make a better video rig. Overkill for a DAW.

Unless you are running a server, doing video, graphics that CPU with that many cores is overkill. I'm on an i7 920 2.6GHz processor and it gets the job done. I'm used to running an MPC +synth+ sound module and I get the same results with a quad core i7. I bought my system in 2009 and it still runs like a champ in live 9.

What a poor wretch!

Well, I'm running 12 xeon cores in my Mac Pro... With 4 kits in machine and dozens of other NI plugins going, the fans don't even throttle up... It's nice (and quiet). Honestly though, the biggest difference was the SSD I put in.

Diva however will still make the thing chug. I think it only threads on a single core and manages to kill it which makes everything crunchy no matter how many cores.

-S

this is over kill for just about anything
i would spend more on a video card and run bitcoin

just my 2 bitcoins

devobtch

Basically I would like to know if my plugins will be distributed evenly amongst the cores.

diva, lush-101, etc...


Does the host or the plugin handle the core distribution?

It depends on the plugin. The vast majority rely on the host for distribution, so in every case it ends up being one plug(or track of plugs) per core. Some, like diva and ace, can do their own multicore distribution and will spread themselves evenly across cores if you enable the option, but most plugins wont and cant do that

what would concern me probably more is what it would do to your workflow - I think you'd get lazy and have a million plug-ins all the time, and I guess that would be fine if it's always on the same machine

but I've always found over the years that I generally want to load up projects on different machines at different times

or maybe something happens to your computer and you can't open any of the projects on anything else

but that's just me

DIVA multicore mode spreads each voice across each core the OS finds for it. On Windows 8 I've seen DIVA running 8 threads.
Ableton Live runs each track on it's own core if it can find a spare thread to run on or it runs multiple tracks on each cores.

You still want each core to be fast enough to run the job. Server CPUS tend to be clocked down to make them live a very long time in a huge server.

If you're running heavyweight multi plugins like Omnisphere in multi mode then you will definitely get better results from having faster cores as the whole multi instance has to be rendered on one core.
I've not shopped for CPUs for a while but I wonder whether you might be better off with a pair of 4 or 6 core Xeons running at 3.5Ghz....

it depends a lot on your workflow, but in this case fewer faster cores would probably be a better investment. you can never assume that more cores will translate directly into higher performance, especially with real-time tasks. your audio performance will be limited by the weakest link in the chain.

XSIMan wrote: Ableton Live runs each track on it's own core if it can find a spare thread to run on or it runs multiple tracks on each cores.
.

but bear in mind routing/sends etc will affect this

fishmonkey wrote:it depends a lot on your workflow, but in this case fewer faster cores would probably be a better investment. you can never assume that more cores will translate directly into higher performance, especially with real-time tasks. your audio performance will be limited by the weakest link in the chain.

+1