Ableton Forum

I am about to buy a new MacPro for my video production company (I am waiting for new announcements before any decision is made). I use Final Cut Studio as well as Ableton Live..... has anyone bought the new 8 core yet? I know it is early days but does anyone know how Live functions on 8 cores?

Is the 8 core worth the extra bucks over the quad (about 2000 bucks)? For the xtra dosh you could almost buy a Macbook Pro. I almost wish we were back in the 80"s as buying decisions were so much easier (every piece of kit was so expensive you could only dream..... and the bank manager was happy).

Live is unbelievable fluid and fast on my Quad.. as is Final Cut Pro and Motion..

Unless you are doing serious amounts of encoding H264 video, HD work, then you might wanna get the top end Quad and spend the extra money on LOTS of RAM, as RAM costs are still quite high for these mofos...

Thanks for that Nobbystylus... we will be doing a shitload of encoding work but as the Mac will be based in my apartment I was hoping to get some use out of it myself for my own evil purposes. You are right though, the 8 core is just too expensive at the moment. I guess the best option is to go for the quad and max it out with Ram.

Thanks again.

I would love to know an answer to this though. im considering the 8 core and i dont care how much it costs because its actually for animation work (but it could work well for gigs too), so long as im not loosing much on the bang for buck ratio ill get it.

i'd question how efficient live is with that many cores though. and considering thats over 2 seperate processors as well, live would have to be programmed very well to take full advantage of that, since you have a lot more throughput issues than you do with just multiple cores on one chip.

so, does anybody have one? and how do the performance scores change if you disable 1 cpu, so your only running off 4 cores?

havent gone close to hitting my cpu hard

the worst ive had on a quad core is about 46% when ive added all the bits and pieces and have loads of idle tracks and plugins..

i just keep stacking instances of battery

ok cool sounds awesome. but it would be great to know if people can see a marked improvement with the 8 core. I've only seen quads in the forum so far.

I've seen performance tests that were very poor for the 8 cores, with % increases in the area if 3 or 4% for some tasks over quad cores but none of those tests were performed with audio so I don't know. The consensus seems to be that for heavy number crunching such as say video encoding there is a significant increase but for real time apps its not really worth it yet while they're still two blocks of four not one block of eight.

But as I said, i've seen nothing that has tested them with audio so I couldn't say for sure!

thanks. ive seen them work with properly threaded 3d aps, and it really does scall perfectly. 8 cores was practically twice as fast as 4. an dude were working and rendering as if it was a little farm on them at the same time.

would be great if i knew audio did the same